If any doubts remained about the size of Facebook, one only needs to look closer at its latest official publication. The social network announced yesterday that it has two billion registered users, an equivalent to 26.6 percent of the world's population. Facebook needed less than five years to double the historical mark of one billion accounts, and its growth was stimulated by increased connectivity in regions such as Asia and Africa.
All the reports that anticipated "the death of Facebook" have been greatly exaggerated. Despite its multiple scandals in recent years (ranging from privacy to information manipulation, through tax evasion and its conflicts with net neutrality, among other things), the truth is that the social network is used more and more, and for longer periods. Yesterday, a brief press release confirmed that Facebook already has two billion users. If we take as a basis a world population of 7.5 billion people, Facebook equals 26.6 percent. Mark Zuckerberg celebrated with a small announcement, and a series of personalized videos is being prepared for users to join.
With two billion users, Facebook remains a considerable distance ahead of YouTube, which records 1.5 billion. The other two members of the "billion club" are WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (1.2 billion in both cases), while Instagram (also under Facebook's wing) has 700 million users. That's more than enough to surpass Snapchat, which according to the latest calculations has about 255 million users, and Twitter, with 328 million. In these last five years (the time it took Facebook to double its billion users), the social network's growth had as a central pillar a greater participation of Asian, African, and Latin American countries. On the other side of the pond, the sum of the United States and Canada barely added 41 million users, suggesting saturation in that market.
Obviously these are good news for Facebook, but the big question is how it will adapt to the enormous challenges ahead. In other words: how does one manage a community with two billion members without it falling apart...?
