More than 1 in 6 access Facebook only on a mobile device

According to Facebook’s most recent SEC filing, the number of daily active users is now 665 million, spread out over Europe, Asia, and the Americas in roughly equal amounts:

Facebook’s monthly active users count is now at 1.11 billion people. Note that Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world are where their sharpest growth in user base is, and that Asia now outweighs the Americas and Europe in terms of audience size. If you thought Facebook was just an American thing, time to reconsider:

Facebook also reports that its mobile user base has increased:

Here’s what you can’t see with the naked eye from these reports. Facebook’s mobile user base has exploded in just three years. How much? Take a look at the percentage increases of mobile users as a part of total users (with the caveat that mobile is a subset of total, not mutually exclusive)

In just three years, the number of people accessing Facebook on a mobile device at least once a month has more than doubled. Today, more than two-thirds of Facebook users access the service via a mobile device at least some of the time.

Here’s the data point you have to dig through previous filings to get at, because no one wanted to chart it. This is the number of mobile ONLY users, people who access Facebook solely through a mobile device, as a percentage of all Facebook users:

That’s astonishing. More than 1 in 6 people use ONLY a mobile device to access Facebook’s services. (You’ll find this buried in the text of every quarterly filing in the mobile MAU section, if you want to dig for it yourself.)

Facebook is growing its audience about 5% quarter over quarter. Its mobile audience is growing at double that pace as a percentage of total users, about 10% quarter over quarter. Its mobile-only audience is growing at double THAT pace, about 20% quarter over quarter.

If you’re in public relations or marketing, not only is Facebook a mandatory part of your strategy, but Facebook’s mobile services must be part of that strategy if you want to remain relevant to the Facebook audience as it grows.

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Strategy

Disclosure: All data was obtained from Facebook’s publicly filed SEC documents. No other data source was used.

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