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Facebook passed a very significant milestone this week, with co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announcing that the site was used by a billion people in a single day on Monday.
This is a huge number, and while Facebook has had a billion or more monthly users since 2012, this was the first time the social network had managed to squeeze this many into a single day.
So how has the site managed to not only stay popular, but continue to grow?
We live in an age where everything seems to be public. Everyone has a camera with them at all times (smartphone) and that device is constantly connected to the internet.
Self-portrait photos not only spawned a phrase that is at the centre of pop culture, but a piece of hardware to take those photos and videos. And all the while Facebook is there as an established platform for this – full of your family, friends and contacts.
One of the biggest draws to Facebook in recent years has been when it’s become the breeding ground for a social campaign.
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is the perfect example of this, where videos of people doing the challenge dominated Facebook during the summer of 2014. Millions was raised for charity too, as the connections Facebook provided meant the challenge spread across the globe quickly.
Facebook’s arrival was timed incredibly well. Though not necessarily intentional, the fact that Zuckerberg put the site together in the first place suggested that at least he was looking for a new way to be social online.
There was MySpace, Bebo and MSN Messenger, but each was limited in its own way. Facebook appeared and changed this – giving users a place to not only interact and message friends, but share entire albums of photos, as well as everything else you’d been doing since they last saw you at secondary school. It was powerful and enticing from the get-go.
This meant that Facebook’s uptake exploded once it left the campuses in the US and went public. In 2006 Facebook had 12 million monthly users; just three years later it was 360 million, rising to more than 600 million the following year before hitting a billion in 2012, eight years after being founded.
What this all means is that the chances are you have an account, and have done for some time. It’s also likely that your profile is full of your photos, videos and other memories. This means it’s firmly embedded in your life, and one of the best and quickest resources for bouts of nostalgia.
Facebook has also not stood still when it comes to tweaking user experience. Video, emoji, Messenger and other content has been added to the platform in order to keep users coming back. There’s been some criticism over the way some of the site’s algorithms work in terms of the content the site pushes to users, but in general the evolution has worked, pulling in more users.
Facebook has also evolved beyond being just a social networking site. The firm has co-founded the Internet.org movement – the plan to bring internet access to the entire planet. Some of this is being driven by the creation of solar-powered drones that can beam internet signals down to remote parts of the world.
Facebook is now very much a technology company, and with that added attention comes more interest and more users of Facebook-powered products. Though there is some “Facebook fatigue” out there, the numbers seem to suggest that we’re still flocking to the site. And now it’s in our billions.
