Facebook has the highest number of active users worldwide among all social media platforms. But exactly how many people use Facebook worldwide, and how does this compare to other social media apps? What are the gender ratio and age distribution of Facebook users?
Just some of the questions you’ll find out from our article, so keep reading.
In this article, we will look at the number and distribution of Facebook users such as:
- Number of Facebook users globally
- FB user statistics by country
- Facebook users by age and gender
- Number of Facebook users compared to other social media platforms
- Number of fake Facebook profiles and bots on Facebook
- Number of iOS vs Android users on Facebook mobile
Highlights of Facebook user numbers
- According to the latest available statistics, Facebook has 2.895 billion monthly active users
- The number of daily active users (DAU) is 1.908 billion
- This makes Facebook by far the social media platform with the largest active user base
- Most monthly active users of Facebook are in India, nearly 300 million
- While Facebook is no longer the most popular social media platform among young people, between age 18-24 and 25-34 are still the most populous age groups in terms of number of users
- There are significantly more men users than women users on Facebook if we look at the gender distribution at a global level.
How many people use Facebook globally?
When we want to specify the number of users of a social media platform, we usually look at two numbers. And neither of them are a number of registered users or the number of downloads from the app stores. (both of which are quite easy to manipulate artificially).
Two KPIs we usually examine are a number of daily active users (DAU) and the number of monthly active users (MAU). These KPIs are also regularly reported by Facebook in their quarterly reports, so we always have reliable and relatively recent Facebook user numbers.
Facebook Monthly Active Users (MAU)
According to Facebook’s latest quarterly report, the number of monthly active users on Facebook was 2.895 billion, and as you can see in the graph below, the number is still growing.
And it’s not as if Facebook’s growth has lagged behind other social media apps in recent years. If you look at the chart showing quarterly growth over the past 12 years, you can see that every quarter Facebook is able to show significant growth in user numbers.
If we look at the number of daily active Facebook users (i.e. the average number of people who log in at least once a day), we can calculate that it is around 60.5% of monthly active users, i.e. a total of 1.908 billion people globally use Facebook on a daily basis. This user KPI also shows a consistent increase over the last few years, as you can in the Statista.com chart:
Facebook user statistics by country
Many people don’t know, but Facebook has the highest number of users in India, not in the US. Although this is not so surprising given the population of the country. India currently has 340 million active Facebook users, while the US has around 200 million:
Number of Facebook users compared to other social media platforms
It’s worth examining how Facebook compares to other popular social media platforms in terms of number of users.
As you can see from the graph below, Facebook dominates the social media landscape:
(It should be added that some platforms do not publish MAU (monthly active users) figures, so the data may come from 3rd party sources.)
By the way, the chart above shows why it is so powerful to run Facebook Ads. With Facebook ads, you can reach not only Facebook users but the users of other top used social media and chat platforms:
- Facebook,
- Facebook Messenger,
Facebook users by age and gender
It is perhaps a well-known fact that Facebook has evolved over the past 10 years from being a social media platform for young people to being more of a social media platform for older people. As young people prefer to use Instagram, Tiktok and Snapchat.
The age and gender statistics of Facebook users somewhat contradict this:
As you can see from this, Facebook is a fairly young platform globally, with the most popular age groups being 18-24 and 25-34, and both age groups being dominated by men.
Although, it should be added that this is mainly due to the fact that Facebook is also hugely popular in the third world, where there are more young people as a percentage of the population, and in these countries, the youth exodus from FB has not yet started.
Number of fake profiles and bots on Facebook
Lately, it has become a separate industry where they create fake profiles and bot profiles to manipulate elections or for other business purposes. Fortunately, Facebook’s algorithm has gotten pretty good at detecting these and deleting them from the platform as soon as possible. Here are some statistics on Facebook’s fake profiles.
According to Facebook, of its almost 2.9 billion users, on average 5% of profiles are not real people, but completely fake profiles. And even with such a high proportion of fake user profiles, Facebook claims to remove 7.7 million fake profiles every day.
Facebook distinguishes between fake user profiles and duplicate profiles, which can account for up to 11% of the total user base. Duplicate Facebook profile are those created by real people who have multiple profile
Android vs iPhone Facebook users
As the most populous Facebook countries are developing countries according to the statistics mentioned above, it is not surprising that Android users dominate Facebook.
In fact, according to the latest data, people who access Facebook via the mobile app, 80.5% of them do so from an Android device, and only 14.3% log in from an iOS product.
This is because Facebook’s user base is now dominated by developing countries, where iPhone penetration is much lower than in North America or in Western Europe.
