Which countries really, really love Facebook? If you guessed the U.S., you would be somewhat right – this country ranks #7 on Pingdom’s new list of countries comparing the number of Facebook users as percentages of the population.
To be clear, we’re not talking about raw number of Facebook users. The U.S. is still #1 there. This is ranking countries by what percentage of the population (online and total) is on Facebook. Or, more simply put, it’s looking at how popular Facebook is in that country.
(The red bars show the number of Facebook users in each country as a percentage of Internet users, yellow bars as a percentage of the population.)
On the island of Cyprus, Pingdom found that 95% of the online population was on Facebook – that’s nearly everyone! And in Chile (#3), there were more Facebook user accounts than Internet users. That could be an anomaly in how the data Pingdom used was compiled, but it could also mean that people had multiple accounts (one for business, one for personal, e.g.).
In its findings, Pingdom also refuted a previous claim which stated that the Philippines was the top country on Facebook, when using similar rankings. Only 28.76% of the population there is on Facebook, says Pingdom, not 93.9%, as had been previously reported. (Note: The Philippine reference is referring to this data: “The Ten Nations Where Facebook Rules the Internet” via 24/7 Wall St.)
India and China, the latter which blocks Facebook, are the largest untapped markets for outside growth, with only 3.42% of India’s population on Facebook and a surprising 530,000 Chinese who have managed to establish accounts despite the country’s attempts to block it.
Facebook had once said that 70% of its growth comes from users outside the U.S. Pingdom says that’s more like 80%. There are now over 800 million Facebook users, out of the 7 billion+ people on Earth.
Since methodology is an important consideration, to generate these rankings (see chart below), Pingdom says it 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. It only looked at countries where the population was greater than 500,000.