Facebook adds 20 million new users since December 10th
I thought it was my imagination- A lot of my friends have joined Facebook recently and most of us are tailend babyboomers but is this a trend? Now AllyInsider confirms my suspicions: FB is blowing away the other social networks.
Their stats:
- The site just crossed 150 million monthly active users.
- That’s more people than there are living in Japan, Russia and Nigeria.
- 50 million of those users are new since the summer.
- 20 million are new since December 10.
- 75 million use the site every single day.
These are astounding figures. What they mean is that Facebook, along with Twitter, has become a de facto global communication platform. From a marketing perspective this is fascinating, however Facebook is very closed (as it should be, IMHO) so it cannot be viewed as a media source.
SM2 collects both Twitter and Facebook, however because we only collect publicly accessible data, our ability to capture Facebook is limited to those conversations that are public. With Twitter we collect public Tweets but not Direct Messages.
One of the differentiation points for SM2 is our Social Media Warehouse. This is our grandiose database of everything social going back to 2007. We don’t just collect conversations based on our users’ searches, we collect everything. Yes, everything (I know from demos that I am required to repeat this at least three times before it sinks in ;-)). That means that if we keep this up we’re going to have an historical record, with meta data, of a huge amount of global communications going forward. The warehouse currently has over 1 billion (with a B) conversations with up to 40 fields of meta data (demographics, location, popularity, reach, URLs, etc.) for each.
If you or your clients are still on the fence about social media please look at the numbers above again. The world has changed.