Insights from Facebook Mobile Usage
Search versus socializing
We don’t carry our mobile phones for a search of information, but to communicate with people.
It seems that Facebook has become one of the major drivers for growth of mobile internet usage. It was last year when mobile operator ads in London Tube started to highlight Facebook instead of Google search as a reason to use mobile internet. During 2009 Facebook’s mobile usage has grown from 20 million to 65 million monthly active users.
Google has reported 5-fold mobile search volume growth during the last two years. In contrast, if Facebook’s mobile usage continued it’s stellar growth, Facebook would have 420 million mobile users at the end of 2010, 23-fold increase in two years. Of course, this won’t happen. Growth has to slow down, as the total amount of Facebook users just flew past 325 million monthly actives.
Facebook Mobile Usage by Platform
It’s interesting to see if Facebook’s mobile usage gives any
insights about internet use on different mobile platforms. Following
graph shows above mentioned 65 million active users, split by the platform.
The highest bar of 27M users is shared between Facebook’s two mobile-optimized web interfaces (m.facebook.com – the standard mobile-optimized site and x.facebook.com for touch-enabled phones) and a few platforms that doesn’t show up as a separate apps, mainly Nokia’s S60 and Windows Mobile.
Facebook for iPhone has over 16M monthly active users, a formiddable number as it means that about 30% of all iPhone and iPod Touch owners (56M) use the application actively. iPhone-owning Facebook users starts to be an interesting market segment of it’s own.
Facebook for Blackberry has about 10M monthly active users. Given that there are about 50 million Blackberries sold, 20% of penetration of Facebook app tells about a thriving mobile platform.
The Java-based Facebook Mobile has around 10 million monthly actives – a small number of over 1 billion Java-enabled phones, but it’s still one of the most downloaded Java applications ever. GetJar reports about 20 million downloads in total for it. In comparison the other top applications, super-popular chat and browser apps eBuddy, Opera Mini and mig33 are around 30M, 22M and 17M downloads, respectively.
Use of Facebook for Android is ridiculously small, under 10000 monthly actives. I haven’t tried the application myself, but I’ve got the impression that it’s rather limited compared to other implementations. Am I correct assuming that Android users typically use Facebook via Android’s web browser? Or are third-party apps like Asurion’s Addressbook popular?
It would be the most interesting to see how the highest bar is further split between mobile web interfaces and Nokia and Windows Mobile. Unfortunately both QuantCast and Compete report suspiciously low numbers of monthly unique visitors for m.facebook.com (between 300K and 1.2M) and x.facebook.com (between 100K and 200K) so further analysis would likely to be incorrect.
Part 2: The future of Facebook Mobile
This introduction to Facebook Mobile stats was the first part of my look into Facebook Mobile. I’m going to post my thoughts about the future of Facebook Mobile and mobile web soon. So if you are interested on the topic, please subscribe to my blog feed here or follow me on Twitter here.
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Is Facebook for iPhone developed by Facebook itself? What about other apps, e.g. Blackberry? Just thinking if that have any effect on the iPhone app popularity.
Jaakko, Facebook for iPhone is developed by Facebook.
Some of the other apps that are branded as ‘Facebook for X’ are actually developed by other parties. I’ve understood that this is true at least for Blackberry and Nokia versions, which are developed by RIM and Nokia in cooperation with Facebook.
I don’t see this as a major issue, though. I assume it is more of a practical choice, development talent for those platforms is not inside FB and it was win-win for both FB and device manufacturer to have a FB app. Facebook is promoting those apps on their mobile pages as part of their “official” offering.
There are also third-party mobile apps allowing varying levels of FB access. I haven’t investigated their popularity, if someone has knowledge about them, it would be great info to share.
Only thing I’ve seen promoted is when I’m on my Nokia N95 and on m.facebook.com, there is a suggestion to load a facebook bookmark to my N95. Is this different on iPhone for example?
I did a quick test, seems that they don’t currently promote iPhone application on m.facebook.com, I don’t know if they did it at some point.
Apps that I’m talking in the post are promoted on http://www.facebook.com/mobile/.
hey teemu,
where did you get these stats? thanks for the great graphic/info. really interesting.
App specific stats are available on Facebook. For example, you can see that Facebook for iPhone has over 28 million monthly active users straight from it’s page.
The number of overall mobile users is available from Facebook’s stats page. Number has grown to over 100 million since writing this article, quite a phenomenal growth!