Infographic: How Facebook Grew Users & Pages In 2011

Lots of attention, and debate, on the growth of Google+ this week. It’s a good time to revisit the figures for that other social network you might have heard of, Facebook. It increased users by 37% to 800 million last year, and brands like Coca-Cola and Disney have millions of fans who follow them on Facebook.

These stats and more were compiled into an infographic from SocialBakers:

Want the infographic for yourself? You’ll find it here: Facebook grew 7 users per second all of 2011.

Gathering Stats

Want to track these types of statistics directly? All Facebook has an excellent Facebook Page Leaderboard for tracking the most popular pages (Twitter Counter has a similar Top 100 page for Twitter accounts).

As for Facebook growth, it maintains a statistics page with the latest active user figures it reports, and it issues updates from time-to-time on the Facebook Blog. Here’s a timeline of announcements:

• August 26, 2008: 100 million
• January 7, 2009: 150 million
• April 8, 2009: 200 million
• July 15, 2009: 250 million
• September 15, 2009: 300 million
• December 1, 2009: 350 million
• February 4, 2009: 400 million
• July 21, 2010: 500 million
• July 6, 2011, 750 million
• Sept. 22, 2012: 800 million (announced during F8 conference)

Keep in mind it’s difficult to compare Facebook figures to Google+ figures, since Facebook reports “active users,” while Google+ does not. These articles have more about that:

• Why You Can’t Compare Google+ User Figures To Facebook & Twitter
• No, Google+ Doesn’t Have A 60 Percent Engagement Rate.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

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Marketing Land Infographics

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