15 Interesting Facts About Facebook You Need to Know

Facebook has attained the coveted dominant position that makes it the most popular and indispensable part of not only our social networking but also our business. It has become a rage since its inception in 2004. Nowadays, if you are not on Facebook, you are probably non-existent in the virtual world.

” 654 million people use Facebook on mobile on a daily basis, an increase from 609 million last quarter. “

If you are using this social media giant for your business, here are some interesting Facebook facts that will help you know and use it in a far better way. Facebook did have a humble beginning, and its dramatic rise is not without some downsides. There are facts that state Facebook’s negative effect on its users. However, the compelling effect of Facebook on social networking is more powerful than its flipside making it the first choice to socialize as well as market one’s business online.

#1.  Are you aware of the Huge User Base of Facebook?

Facebook now has close to 350 million active users, with approximately 35 of these updating their status every day. 63% of users log on to Facebook daily. A majority of this access the network from their smartphones.

Statistics reveal that users log in close to 14 times during a day from their mobiles. On average, a user has 130 friends and sends 8 friend requests every month. Statistics reveal that there is approximately a 3.74 degree of separation between any two Facebook users.

Every minute around 2.5 million photos are being uploaded onto Facebook and close to 4.5 billion ‘likes’ are being generated on a daily basis as of May 2013, equating to 1.8 million ‘likes’ every minute. Every second five new profiles are being created on Facebook.

#2.  Are There Fake Accounts? Yes, at least 83 Million Fake Accounts

Yes, there are facebook fake accounts. About 8.7% of users on Facebook are fake profiles and the total of fake profiles reaches 83 million. Surprisingly, there are even accounts of dead people, accounting for close to 30 million! Also, do you know that approximately 600,000 attempts to hack Facebook accounts are made every day?

#3.  What Is The Best Time To Reach An Extended Audience?

The maximum traffic on Facebook happens around 1 pm to 3 pm midweek, with Thursdays and Fridays having 18% higher engagements compared to other days of the week. Also, the common age group is from 25 to 34 years, making up 29.7% of the overall users. Gender-wise, Facebook is equally popular and frequented by both genders, with 53% users being females and 47% being males. 50% of youngsters of the age bracket 18 to 24 years usually log on to Facebook first thing after waking up. Women aged 55 years and older are currently the fastest-growing demographics of Facebook users in the US. You can use these facts to focus on more aggressive marketing strategies during these peak traffic hours and for specific demographics too.

#4.  Want More Data to Judge Facebook’s Growing Popularity?

If the above facts and figures are not enough proof of Facebook’s ever-growing popularity, then the following ones should seal the deal.

• • There are more Facebook users in the US compared to the number of citizens who voted in the last US elections.
  • In Australia, a court notice can be served to defendants on Facebook, and summons posted on Facebook are considered legally binding.

All these figures point to the fact that Facebook has become an inevitable part of our everyday lives and cannot be ignored by businesses trying to establish a footing in the now popular social media domain. Hence we can indeed make a good profit if we can use this site effectively!

#5.  Is Facebook A Boon for Businesses? How Can You Make Profit Using It?

Doing business on Facebook has never been so lucrative. There are about 1.35 million active Facebook users worldwide of which 864 million users logging in daily, thus indicating an increase of 14% over the last year. In Europe alone there are 223 million people who have accounts on Facebook. Interestingly, if Facebook was a country, it would be the fifth-largest, after China, India, the US, and Indonesia. All these figures establish the fact that there is a large active target audience on Facebook. And most of this audience is a consistent audience to various marketing efforts of marketers. Also, as Facebook has a worldwide reach you can catch the attention of not just the US, but reach out globally.

#6.  How Facebook Helps Marketer? Can It Be Termed As A Marketing Heaven?

There are close to 30 million businesses that have a Facebook Page. Close to 1.5 million businesses are now paying for advertising on Facebook. Most of these businesses are paying 122% more per ad unit than they did last year. The sales are impressive – if last quarter’s figures are considered – users purchased goods worth $234 million dollars! Close to 42% of marketers suggest that Facebook is vital and indispensable to their business. However, to make the best use of this site and get maximum profit, you need to market your business in a positive manner and stand out among your competitors. As of May 2013, almost 16 million pages of local businesses have been created as compared to 8 million created in June 2012, indicating a 100% increase. These figures are proof that companies are acknowledging the fact that Facebook users comprise a major chunk of their clients and are thus willing to advertise, as well as create interesting pages to be seen.

#7.  Making Use of Facebook’s Tracking Data in Reaching out to Your Audience

Facebook keeps a track of the sites we visited even after we have logged out. This tracking assists businesses to indulge in intelligent marketing, but only when they get access to the information. Pages will display advertisements in accordance with the type of pages or sites visited by individual users, and thus will help you reaching the interested audience faster.

#8.  Facebook is a Platform to Know and Understand People

Facebook has now become a sort of people search engine and is often used to know people, their likes and dislikes, opinions, etc. Data reveals that people search one billion times in a day on Facebook. This has made Facebook the overall second-ranked site in the US, after Google. A survey of 500 colleges revealed that Facebook accounts were visited by 10% of admission officers to evaluate the applicants seeking admissions. About 38% of these officers acknowledged that what they saw on Facebook affected the applicant’s admission negatively. Even job seekers and prospective marriage suitors are evaluated on Facebook. The police department as well as citizens are resorting to Facebook to nab suspected criminals.

#9.  Facebook’s Role in Helping Businesses to Grow

Facebook and social media craze has also given rise to different types of professionals. There are a lot of consultants who guide businesses on how to tap the market on Facebook, how to launch campaigns on social media networks, and how to advertise. Also, programmers and developers are benefiting from this rage. The number of developers building applications for Facebook is close to 800,000.

#10.  History of Facebook: The Beginning

Are you aware that Facebook had humble beginnings? Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, created Facemash in 2003, where photos of undergraduates were placed beside each other, and visitors to the site could rank which student they found “hotter”. Facemash eventually turned into the now universally known Facebook in 2005. In the beginning, Facebook was like a directory of sorts linking all students, faculty alumni, and staff at various colleges and universities through social networks. Initially, Facebook was limited to only Harvard university students but later on added other colleges and universities. Within 6 months of its launch, Facebook had around 200 colleges registered as users. Mark Zuckerberg went on to become the youngest billionaire at the age of 25 with a net worth of $1.5 million. As an aside, if you ever wondered why Facebook is blue, it is because its founder Mark Zuckerberg suffers from color blindness and cannot distinguish between red and green. Another intriguing piece of historical information was that twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss had hired Mark Zuckerberg to program their site ConnectU or Harvard Connect but claimed that he stole their idea. There was a lawsuit that was settled for an undisclosed amount. Mark Zuckerberg’s fellow students such as Aaron Greenspan also made similar claims of having invented Facebook.

#11.  The Facebook to Facebook and Its Role in Ads

By the way, do you know that Facebook was first called Facebook (thefacebook.com)? Right from the beginning, Facebook or Facebook had its media plan chalked out. Eduardo Saverin, Facebook’s CFO, back in 2004, approached advertisers to run standard IAB ads emphasizing the personal data they could access and target audiences by their universities, political inclination, or even dorms or their sexual orientation. Even though at its nascent stage, Eduardo Saverin quoted $80,000 for advertising through Facebook.

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, was the first person to invest in Facebook in June 2004 and invested $500,000 dollars. Li Hu Shing, East Asia’s richest man, invested in 2005 in Facebook around $120 million dollars. Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment firm, in May 2009, invested $200 million for a 1.96% stake in the Facebook website. By September 2009, Facebook was making a profit, with Mark Zuckerberg announcing that for the first time Facebook had a positive cash flow and made more money than it spent.

#12.  The Facebook-Myspace Affair

In 2005, MySpace, another popular social network site, sent an offer to buy Facebook but when Mark Zuckerberg quoted a price of US $75 million they rejected the offer thinking it to be too expensive. The tables have turned since then and Facebook not only outnumbered the traffic on MySpace but also American users spend 13.9 billion minutes on Facebook in a year compared to 5 billion minutes on MySpace. Facebook spends approximately US $30 million in a month to just host the site and loses about US $25,000 every minute when the site is down.

One of Facebook’s many quirky facets is that the language can be changed to ‘pirate’ too. Another interesting Facebook fact is that the “like’ button was originally going to be called ‘Awesome’. In 2009, the New Oxford Dictionary declared “unfriend” to be the word of the year and defined it as “to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site”.Even though Facebook boasts of being a gold mine for investors and advertisers, it has had negative impacts on users too.

#13.  What are the Negative Effects of Facebook?

However, this social networking giant has its negative too.  It has led to many negative consequences. For example, people have been murdered after they ‘unfriended’ someone on Facebook. Cases of depression too, with 1 in 3 users feeling low and unsatisfied with their lives post visiting Facebook were in the news. Girls have been predisposed to depression and anxiety by chatting too much with their Facebook friends. Frequently talking about the same problems is called ‘co-rumination and can lead to a serious obsession, which is not healthy. Of the divorces filed in the US in 2011, around a third of them had the word Facebook mentioned.

Facebook has become such an addiction that a man hired a woman to slap him every time he logged onto Facebook. Another bizarre incident is that of a woman in Britain who created fake profiles and sent abusive messages to herself. She was sent to jail for 20 months. In England and Wales, the head of the Catholic Church warned patrons that children could be vulnerable to committing suicide because of Facebook and MySpace, as these sites barbarize community life and encourage fleeting relationships among teens. Facebook also has eating disorder groups named “Get thin or die trying” and “What nourishes me destroys me”, which encourage starving, and since the majority of users are teenagers and young adults such groups influence them negatively.

#14.  Are You Aware Of Issues Like Banning and Misuse?

Since 2009, Facebook along with Twitter and The New York Times have been blocked in China due to its negative influence. The site has also been banned by Syria, Iran, and Vietnam.

The sharing of information, including personal details, on Facebook has been a bane, too. This information has been used without permission by various miscreants. The director of public policy of Facebook, Tim Sparapani, complained that millions of users shared information online without stopping to think about the consequences. Facebook itself is to be blamed for this at some point, as the information assumed to be public (like profile name, display pictures, cities) is available to any Facebook user or to their friends who use any Facebook application. Also in 2009, Facebook’s controversial advertisement system, Beacon that gave out user’s shopping activity information to other sites, was part of a lawsuit. The settlement resulted in Facebook paying $9.5 million towards a settlement fund.

There are also several absurd cases where Facebook has been misused. Lauren Michaels, a 23-year-old woman, in 2008, created a group on Facebook titled “I need sex” and slept with about 50 of the 100-plus members. Since then her page has been removed. An EMT in 2009 took a picture of at the crime scene of a dead New York woman who had been beaten and strangled to death and posted the picture on Facebook. He later faced arrest on charges of official misconduct and was removed from his job. Such facts and cases warn us to use Facebook wisely. It is not its popularity, but the consequences of this popularity that are rather frightening.

#15.  Facebook becomes one of the most powerful Marketing Platform

If you evaluate properly the ratio of active users of Facebook to any other social media, you can notice the big difference! Here are some tips that can help you to better market your business on Facebook:

• • Try to find out if you are marketing at the right time- that is during peak hours!
  • You are targeting the right demographic
  • You are consistent in engaging people and keeping them updated about your business

We are sure you will get better results following the above simple tips. We would appreciate your next query on better marketing on Facebook to get the maximum profit!

AboutSharanyan Sharma

Sharanyan Sharma is a highly accomplished Sri Lankan technology entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant, whose exceptional achievements have earned him widespread recognition in the industry. He is renowned as the founder of the globally acclaimed company, Prime One Global, which has been honored with numerous prestigious awards for its exceptional contributions to the field.