Half Of The American Population Use Facebook

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The numbers are astonishing and somewhat hard to believe. Nearly 42.3% of the entire American population with internet access used Facebook this month alone (this news is just in according to a new report from eMarketer) and most adult Americans with Internet access use Facebook at least once a month. Impossible! Last year, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook saw around 250 million daily users of its 500 million user base (that’s nearly half of the total users; if you apply a little math). Zuckerberg also pointed out that Facebook’s products including Places, Photos, Messages and Groups are features that FB users use more frequently than they use other established services with similar features.

This is likely because Facebook has ultimately created a one stop hub for users who like to post whereabouts (as they would on Foursquare), post pictures (as they would on Flickr), post statues and messages (as they would with Twitter) and share like interest in groups (as they would with most all social networks).

The one-stop-shop effect of Facebook is likely ...
... what is keeping it consistently so far ahead of the game. These numbers are just shocking. Not that I know that many people, but out of the people that I do happen to know there are quite a few that are not Facebook users. Upon assessing these statistics based on the small number of people in my circle I’d have to say those that use Facebook (even just once a month) are significantly less than 42.3%.

I guess coming from a Twitter lover, like myself, it is hard to swallow the fact that Twitter is only being accessed by around 7% of the total population and 9% of the internet using population (also according to the eMarketer report). It is stated that Twitter is driven by power users (the ones that spend over 60 minutes on the service every month) and only 21 % of registered users are actually active on the site. Ultimately only 22.5% of users are responsible for 90% of all tweets. This statistic isn’t shocking as I have noticed that Twitter users are divided into two categories: Heavy Tweeters and Tweet Watchers; there really is no in between.

Though last year around this time Twitter only penetrated about 7% it is expected to be at 11% by this year’s end. According to an analyst for eMarketer “eMarketer’s new Twitter usage estimates are lower than our April 2010 forecast. Since then, Twitter has continued to gain traction but at more moderate levels than we had expected.” Twitter celebrated 100 million new accounts created in 2010 but a lot of that growth was due to the company’s investment in official and device-integrated mobile apps.

What is going on there, Twitter? I thought ever one loved you. I guess my prediction that Facebook will become a thing of the past (almost like MySpace) and Twitter will take the lead as the booming social network (much like Facebook) will have to hold off for a while.