According To Facebook, 8.7% Of Accounts Aren’t Real

During Facebook’s first earnings call last week a good chunk of user data was released. Facebook reported 955 million monthly active users, 552 million active daily users, 543 million monthly active mobile users. The official 10-Q filing that was published this week was quite transparent around user data showing that a total of 8.7% of users (83.09 million) were not real accounts.

The false users can be broken down by the following groups and percentages:

• 4.8% – Duplicate accounts
• 2.4% – Mis-classified accounts (business page as a profile..etc)
• 1.5% – Undesirable accounts (spammers)

We estimate that “duplicate” accounts (an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account) may have represented approximately 4.8 percent of our worldwide MAUs as of June 30, 2012. We also seek to identify “false” accounts, which we divide into two categories: (1) user-misclassified accounts, where users have created personal profiles for a business, organization, or non-human entity such as a pet (such entities are permitted on Facebook using a Page rather than a personal profile under our terms of service); and (2) undesirable accounts, which represent user profiles that we determine are intended to be used for purposes that violate our terms of service, such as spamming. As of June 30, 2012, we estimate user-misclassified accounts may have represented approximately 2.4 percent of our worldwide MAUs and undesirable accounts may have represented approximately 1.5 percent of our worldwide MAUs.

This 8.7% tally has increased since a projection of 5-6% back in March.

Regardless of the numbers, it’s beneficial to see real user data from the network, something that other social sites avoid.

h/t CNET

About The Author

Greg Finn

Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that provides world-class social media and search marketing services and web & application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 10+ years and specializes in Digital Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn.