Facebook has 1.84bn daily active users

 "Facebook daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.84 billion on average for December 2020, an increase of 11% year-over-year.

Facebook monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 2.80 billion as of December 31, 2020, an increase of 12% year-over-year.

Family daily active people (DAP) – DAP was 2.60 billion on average for December 2020, an increase of 15% year-over-year.

Family monthly active people (MAP) – MAP was 3.30 billion as of December 31, 2020, an increase of 14% year-over-year.

Capital expenditures – Capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, were $4.82 billion and $15.72 billion for the fourth quarter and full year of 2020, respectively.

Cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities – Cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities were $61.95 billion as of December 31, 2020.

Headcount – Headcount was 58,604 as of December 31, 2020, an increase of 30% year-over-year."

Source:  Facebook's Q4 2020 Results, 27th January 2021

Carat Trends 2021

 Carat's Trends for 2021 - 12 trends to help navigate the next few years.

Carat Trends 2021 - The Year of Emotionally Intelligent Marketing from Carat Global

More than 3bn people a month access Facebook's 'family' of services

Source:  Facebook's Q2 2020 earning slides, July 2020

Note - The 'family' of services is Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp

Facebook's usage has gone up by 50% as a result of the coronavirus

"The coronavirus has ended up a boon for social media giant Facebook, which saw a 50 percent spike in usage as the virus ate its way through the country’s health and economy.
The usage of the social media network’s numerous features, such as messenger and video calls, has spiked in recent weeks as millions of Americans have had to stay home to avoid the virus. This is a sharp turnaround from not so long ago when the social network seemed to be collecting dust, mostly seeing use from older people as the youth flocked to newer models of social media.
But as of late, Facebook has been seeing increases in news consumption as well, with more than half the articles consumed on the site relating to the virus pandemic. Ranjan Subramanian, a data analyst with the company, talked about the increase in a blog post, calling it “unprecedented.”
The report says the bulk of the increase — over 90 percent — can be credited to what Facebook terms “Power News Consumers” and “Power News Discussers,” who consume and talk about news more than most users of the service. The company, monitoring the activity from that spike fervently, wants to make sure all news put out about the worldwide crisis is as accurate and authoritative as possible — a kind of real-time experiment in how to handle news on social media."

Source:  PYMNTS, 25th March 2020

Over 2.1 billion people use Facebook's apps on a daily basis

"Facebook said over 2.1 billion people now use its family of applications—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger—on a daily basis, and more than 2.7 billion do so on a monthly basis.
Facebook reported an average of 1.59 billion daily active users at the end of the second quarter, up 8% compared with the year-ago period. Wehner said gains in India, Indonesia and the Philippines helped drive growth."

Source:  AdWeek, 26th July 2019

Facebook's revenues grew 28% year on year in Q2 2019

"Facebook reported a 28% revenue gain to $16.9 billion in Q2 from a year earlier, as the social media giant shook off negative headlines and a record-setting fine for its data-sharing practices this week. Mobile ad revenue hit $15.6 billion, or about 94% of total ad revenue, COO Sheryl Sandberg said in the Wednesday conference call with analysts. The figure was 12% higher than the $13.9 billion reported in Q1, highlighting the importance of mobile ads for Facebook.
Mobile-first video accounted for more than 50% of video revenue for the company, Sandberg said. Brands are working to develop "thumb-stopping" creative that hooks mobile viewers faster than 30-second TV ads. "The best mobile-first ad or ad on Facebook gets to the main point or gets to the product in the first three seconds," she said.
Facebook's "blue" app, its oldest and biggest product, boosted its user base by 8% to 2.41 billion in Q2 from a year earlier, making it the largest social media platform worldwide. Daily active users (DAUs) rose 6% to 1.59 billion from a year earlier. The figures generally don't include users of Instagram, WhatsApp or Oculus, per Facebook's report."
Source:  Facebook Q2 2019 Results, reported by Mobile Marketer, 25th July 2019

Facebook Watch has 140m DAUs & 742m MAUs

"Facebook says bigger audiences are revving up revenues for publishers and creators on Watch, its rival to YouTube.
On Wednesday, Facebook revealed updated audience stats on Watch, the video platform it launched in 2017 to drive viewers to longer video programs where they would be more inclined to watch commercials, and it now has 140 million daily active viewers and 720 million monthly active viewers. Facebook, like YouTube, splits ad revenue with video creators; Facebook gives them 55 percent of the haul.
At the end of last year, Facebook said that 75 million people viewed Watch shows daily and 400 million each month. Viewers are counted if they only spend one minute watching videos, so Facebook is not measuring the audience in the same way as, say, a TV network would."
Source:  AdAge, 12th June 2019

National Geographic is the first brand to get to 100m followers on Instagram

"National Geographic ventured into uncharted territory last week, this time on Instagram, where it became the first brand to top 100 million followers. But the publisher’s success is more than organic. Its revenue from social advertising was up 80 percent in 2018 compared with the previous year."
Source:  AdWeek, 19th February 2019

Instagram Stories has 500m daily users

"Roughly half of Instagram’s  1 billion users now use Instagram Stories every day. That 500 million daily user count is up from 400 million in June 2018. 2 million advertisers are now buying Stories ads across Facebook’s properties.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Stories the last big game-changing feature from Facebook,  but after concentrating on security last year, it plans to ship more products that make “major improvements” in people’s lives."
Source:  Techcrunch, 30th January 2019

The main social media site used by UK kids 12-15

Source: Ofcom's Children & Parents:  Media Use and Attitudes Report 2018, 28th January 2019
PDF here
Long PDF with much more data here

Facebook has 1.5bn daily active users; 93% of ad revenue is mobile

"Daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.52 billion on average for December 2018, an increase of 9% year-over-year.
Monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 2.32 billion as of December 31, 2018, an increase of 9% year-over-year.
Mobile advertising revenue – Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 93% of advertising revenue for the fourth quarter of 2018, up from approximately 89% of advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2017.
Capital expenditures – Capital expenditures were $4.37 billion and $13.92 billion for the fourth quarter and full year 2018, respectively.
Cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities – Cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities were $41.11 billion at the end of the fourth quarter of 2018.
Headcount – Headcount was 35,587 as of December 31, 2018, an increase of 42% year-over-year."
Source:  Facebook Q4 & full year 2018 results, 30th January 2019

There are more than 10m apps ('mini programmes') on WeChat

"They may not be widely known outside of China, but Tencent’s mini program initiative to develop “apps” that live outside of app stores is bearing fruit after it clocked two notable landmarks: 200 million daily users and one million apps.
In recent years, Tencent’s WeChat  messaging app has blossomed into a universe of its own with myriad services that span from food delivery to getting loans. But the Chinese messaging app wants to lock users in for longer — and its mini program scheme appears to show promise.
Back in January 2017, Tencent introduced “mini programs,” which are essentially lightweight apps that run inside WeChat. When you need to hail a cab, for example, instead of downloading the standalone Didi Chuxing app, you can summon its mini program on WeChat in the blink of an eye.
WeChat now has over one million such mini programs, Tencent founder and CEO Pony Ma said today at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China. (Third-party analytics firm Aladdin mentioned this milestone in a June report.) That makes its ecosystem half the size of the Apple App Store, which recorded 2.1 million apps in April."

Source:  TechCrunch, 7th November 2018

$300m has been raised through Facebook Birthday Fundraisers in one year

"Today we’re sharing some major milestones for the first year of birthday fundraisers on Facebook and announcing plans to help people more easily find nonprofits to support in the year ahead.
People raised more than $300 million for the causes they care about using birthday fundraisers.
St. Jude, Alzheimer’s Association, the American Cancer Society, Share Our Strength – No Kid Hungry, and the ASPCA are among the top beneficiaries of birthday fundraisers."
Source:  Facebook's newsroom, 15th August 2018

Facebook referrals to Slate have fallen by over 85% since January 2017

Source:  Data from Parsely, reported by Slate, 27th June 2018

Instagram has over a billion monthly active users

Source:  Techcrunch, 21st June 2018

Top activities performed on smart phones by American users

Source:  Parks Associates, 14th June 2018

Social media usage by American teens

Source:  Pew Research Center's Teens, Social Media & Technology Report 2018, 31st May 2018
Note - YouTube should not be included in this list in my view.  It's unlike the others in that you can use it without having an account

Facebook deleted nearly 1.3bn fake accounts in 6 months

"Facebook disabled nearly 1.3 billion “fake” accounts over the past two quarters, many of them bots “with the intent of spreading spam or conducting illicit activities such as scams,” the company said on Monday.
Facebook disabled 583 million accounts in Q1 2018, down from 694 million accounts in Q4 of last year, a decrease the company attributes to its “variability of our detection technology’s ability to find and flag them.”
Most of the accounts “were disabled within minutes of registration,” Facebook claimed in a blog post, but Facebook doesn’t catch all fake accounts. The company estimates that 3 percent to 4 percent of its monthly active users are “fake,” up from 2 percent to 3 percent in Q3 of 2017, according to filings documents.
Those numbers are big, a reminder of what Facebook is up against just 18 months after it was learned that a Russian troll farm used Facebook to try and influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Facebook says it finds most of the accounts on its own using software algorithms, but a small percentage — about 1.5 percent of the disabled accounts — were discovered after they were flagged by Facebook."
Source:  Recode, 15th May 2018
Note - This seems to be just on Facebook, and not on Instagram or WhatsApp (it's only Facebook that insists on a real identity)

35% of American adults use Instagram

Source:  Pew Internet & American Life Project, quoted in Adweek, 1st March 2018
Link to full report here

Fake news spreads more quickly than genuine news

"We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it."
Source:  Abstract of The spread of true and false news online by Soroush Vosoughi1, Deb Roy, Sinan Aral, reported in Science, 9th March 2018