Enrique of the Internet World Statistics sent me this email in his newsletter :-
“We are almost there, very soon the Internet will hit two billion users. Yes, almost2,000,000,000 with a big B, two billion people are using the Internet. An amazing accomplishment because in just 15 years (1995-2010), the Knowledge Society has conquered Planet Earth, and nothing will be the same ever again. “One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind”, like someone said before me, 41 years ago.
But today I am not going to discuss the Internet. Today, for the first time, we show our methodology applied to analyzing the Facebook World Stats. The results are very revealing regarding the power and worldwide force of this web platform that has grown to become by far the largest and most important social network in the Internet.
The results are summarized in a new statistics table and three bar charts, that you can view at Facebook World Usage, using data as of August 31, 2010. We have found useful to introduce a new Internet Metric that we shall call the Facebook Index. It corresponds to the percentage of Internet Users that are also Facebook Users, in any country or geographic region.
The statistics show that Africa’s Facebook Index (the percent of Internet users on Facebook) is just 1.7% compared with 43% in North America and 2.4% in Asia. Facebook is set to grow significantly in Africa and from a commercial perspective might provided an effective means of targeting specific sectors of the economy.
I do not have the breakdown of Facebook users of individual African countries but will get them and discuss the implications of this on investor relations and corporate strategy. Facebook is growing into a platform that cannot be ignored.