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Facebook still dominates social media


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Facebook remains the dominant social media platform, according to the recently released “Digital 2020: Global Digital Overview Report.” With over 2.4 billion monthly active users, Facebook’s exponential growth has slowed in recent years largely due to saturation. Even with the slowdown, the world’s largest social platform is nowhere near losing its coveted No. 1 spot.

Produced by Kepios, Hootsuite and We Are Social, the 247-page Global Digital Overview report offers a global snapshot of how consumers use the internet, mobile devices, social media and e-commerce. Then there’s the 259-page Global Digital Yearbook that offers “essential digital data for every country in the world.”

For this blog post, we focus specifically on Facebook data. We harvested the Facebook-specific slides from the Global Digital Overview to create a scaled-down, 23-page document. We did not edit or manipulate the content contained on the slides.

Click the link below to review the Digital2020 Facebook stats document or click the button to download.

If you want to learn more about the comprehensive report, refer to our last blog post: Report reveals growing global digital engagement.

While there are nearly countless fascinating Facebook factoids contained in the report, we will highlight some of the more useful data to help you plan your social media marketing strategy.

Facebook audience overview

The image below details the potential number of consumers that marketers can reach using advertisements on Facebook. This includes quarter-on-quarter changes in Facebook’s advertising reach and percentage breakdown of advertising audience that is male versus female. Note that Facebook only offers advertising audience data for the genders “male” and “female.”

Facebook audience overview for marketing and advertising

Monthly active users

The image below shows the latest reported number of monthly active Facebook users at the start of each year, with the associated year-on-year change. Note the growth rate is slowing as Facebook’s global saturation rate increases.

Facebook's monthly active users over time

Advertising audience profile

The image below details the share of Facebook’s global advertising audience by age group and gender. These are extrapolations of data from Facebook’s self-service advertising tools (January 2020). With 19 percent, the tallest bar on the graph goes to males 25 to 34 years old. With 14 percent, the second-highest bar goes to males 18 to 24 years old. Not surprisingly, the shortest bars represent users over 65 years old.

Access by device

The slide below shows what devices users employ to access Facebook. Note a whopping 98 percent of users (nearly all) access the social media platform via some type of mobile phone. Not just a mobile device but specifically a mobile phone. And 79 percent of users only access Facebook via mobile phone compared to only 1.9 percent who exclusively access the social media platform on a laptop or desktop computer.

Access by mobile operating system

The image below highlights the percentage of Facebook’s mobile audience broken down by mobile operating system (OS).

  • Percentage of mobile users accessing via apps on Android devices: 80.8.
  • Percentage of mobile users accessing via apps on Apple (iOS) devices: 14.2.
  • Percentage of mobile users accessing via other operating systems or mobile web browsers: 5.

Note the figure for the final item above is based on all mobile devices used, including tablet devices running Android or Apple iOS operating systems. Data for mobile web browsers may also include users accessing via either Android or iOS devices.

Top pages

The slide below lists the top 20 Facebook pages globally. These pages had the greatest number of page likes in January 2020.

What do you think?

32 comments on “Facebook still dominates social media

blair villanueva

I prefer Facebook (than Twitter) coz you can write longer posts, and engage well. And based on demographic (in PH) Facebook is the place where everyone is equal than on Twitter (just my observation).

we have seen how facebook evolves and remains on top. i like the platform and how it helps content creators share their contents to the world.

Everyone is always saying that Facebook will be losing active profiles but that doesn’t seem to be true 🙂

Facebook advertising is definitely hit or miss! Thanks so much for the great read!

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