UK has 3rd largest Facebook usage by population penetration
Its official, the UK has become a nation of Facebook addicts. As of July 2010, more than 26 million people from the United Kingdom now use Facebook actively. In percentage of population that is more than 42%, in front of the USA at just over 40%.
Facebook has just reached 500,000,000 active users, so currently the UK makes up just over 5% of Facebook membership compared to nearly 20% of USA Facebooker’s.
How much larger Facebook can actually grow? Well this is another discussion entirely, but it is sure to plateau soon unless they are able to crack some otherwise untapped markets such as India and Brazil. At first glance these look like big markets, however there are two separate problems:-
India’s population is massive 1.2 Billion, but they still have a very low internet use penetration of 6.9%, this is however an enormous amount of people still (81,000,000), and I’m sure that the people at Facebook would be happy to increase its 10.5 million users to the same levels at the UK, which would add another 20 million users to their tally.
Brazil has another problem entirely, it comes in the form of another little known (in the UK) Social Network called Orkut, owned by Google, Orkut boasts 100 million active users, with 48,000,000 of these from Brazil. This is compared to Brazils current 4.75 million Facebook users.
There are of course other markets out there, but at the moment you have to rule out China, as their Great Firewall currently blocks Facebook entirely.
One thing is for certain though, Facebook has emerged from the heady post dotcom bubble to reignite the dreams of the Web2.0 generation, and with it’s IPO scheduled for 2012, there is going to be some serious money involved.
The above information was gathered from Wikipedia, Internet World Stats and The Guardian
