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Facebook used by more than half the population in some countries

Facebook lets users squirrel items away

Social networking site Facebook has grown to become the biggest social networking site in the world with more than 800 million active users, but just how popular is it with users living around the globe?

“Facebook currently has more than 800 million active users. With a world population having just passed the 7 billion barrier, that would mean that around 11% of people on Earth are on Facebook,” said market analyst firm Pingdom in a December 28 post on its Royal Pingdom blog, but added that “[t]hat’s of course not necessarily true, as there are organizations and businesses that have Facebook accounts, and some individuals may have more than one, but it’s a staggering number nonetheless.”

The US is often reported as having the largest number of Facebook users in the world; however, it also has a much bigger population than many other Facebook-using countries.

Pingdom set out to discover how popular the social network was in countries with a population of more than 500,000 by comparing a country’s population with the number of reported Facebook users in the region.

“We took SocialBaker’s data on how many Facebook users there are in countries around the world, data on Internet users from the World Bank, and population data from Wikipedia,” said Pingdom.

According to the figures Facebook is most popular in Cyprus, where 69% of the entire country is hooked on Facebook.

Hong Kong is second with 53 percent of the population and is followed by Chile (52%), Singapore (51%), Norway (51%), Denmark (51%), the United States (50%), Canada (49%), the UK (49%) and Sweden (48%).

Market researcher comScore found that Facebook was still the most popular social network in the US with 166 million unique visitors in November in a report published in December. Twitter was second with 35.4 million unique visitors, and business-focused social network Linkedin ranked third with 35 million unique visitors for November.

ComScore said the average user spent around 6.6 hours per month on Facebook, an increase of 37% from the year before.