The rise and rise of Facebook is producing a scramble by marketers and companies to leverage its huge global database and traffic.

Google is looking over its shoulder as Facebook grows at over 10 million users a month and sits currently at number two on web traffic rankings according to Alexa.com.

Last year Facebook surpassed Google for the top ranking for total time spent online.

Google is even being forced to continually adjust its search engine algorithms to cater for the a social web that provides more prominence for social channels in its search results. Facebook has also become the 3rd largest video website with 46.6 million viewers sitting behind number one ranked video content property provider Google with its YouTube site and Yahoo at second ranking.

50 Facebook Facts and Figures

1 in every 13 people on Earth is on Facebook 35+ demographic represents more than 30% of the entire user base 71.2 % of all USA internet users are on Facebook In 20 minutes 1,000,000 links are shared on Facebook In 20 minutes 1,484,000 event invites are posted In 20 minutes 1,323,000 photos are tagged In 20 minutes 1,851,000 status updates are entered In 20 minutes 1.972 million friend requests are accepted In 20 minutes 2,716,000 photos are uploaded In 20 minutes 2,716,000 messages are sent In 20 minutes 10.2 million comments are posted In 20 minutes 1,587,000 wall posts are written 750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook over New Year’s weekend 48% of young Americans said they found out about news through Facebook 48% of 18 to 34 year olds check Facebook right when they wake up 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day Average user has 130 friends People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages) Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month. More than 70 translations available on the site About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites Since social plugins launched in April 2010, an average of 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including over 80 of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites There are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users. There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products Al Pacino’s face was on the original Facebook homepage One early Facebook function was a file sharing service The first “Work Networks” as well as the original educational networks included Apple and Microsoft The meaning of the term poke has never been defined There is an ‘App’ to see what’s on the Facebook cafe menu Mark Zuckerburg (CEO of Facebook) calls himself a “Harvard Graduate” when in fact he didn’t graduate (apparently his reply is that “there isn’t a setting for dropout”) Australian’s spend more time per month on Facebook than any other country at over 7 hours on average A Facebook employee hoodie sold for $4,000 on eBay Facebook was initially bank-rolled by Peter Thiel the co-founder of PayPal for $500,000 It is the second biggest website by traffic behind Google (at the moment) Facebook is now valued at approximately $80 billion Facebook makes money through advertising and virtual products Facebook was almost shut down by a lawsuit by ConnectU who claimed that Zuckerburg stole the idea and Technology for Facebook (the issue was settled out of court) The USA has the largest Facebook user base with 155 million people which represents 23.6% of Facebook’s total users There is over 16,000,000 Facebook fan pages Texas Hold’em Poker is the most popular Facebook page with over 41 million fans More than 650 million active users

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