integratePR blog

On Thursday, July 22, 2010 Facebook reached 1/2 a billion members!

As a result, the social and digital media world has been in full-swing celebration. The series Facebook Stories was launched online and shares hundreds of Facebook stories since the site’s inception back in February of 2004. The campaign started with the story of the first privacy fiasco and then invites others from around the world to share how Facebook has impacted their lives. The stories are sorted by theme or by location and an interactive map on the site places a dot on a world map to represent each shared story.

ABC World News also aired an interview between Diane Sawyer and CEO/Founder Mark Zuckerberg in which they discussed the site’s history, recent lawsuit and upcoming movie, The Social Network.

Zuckerberg remained humble, and claims that the movie’s buzz adding in glitz and drama to make the story much more exciting than it really is, but since 2004 the Facebook craze has spread faster than the internet—nearly twice as fast to be exact!. Initially developed to target college students and help them network and make friends in their new stage of life, it wasn’t long before the trend found it’s way into high school, middle school and more recently, to parents! There’s no denying the impact this social media site has had on the digital world.

As the social networking community rejoiced in Facebook’s success, sites all over the web began posting facts and demographics about the wildly popular networking site. Since we here at integratePR love that Facebook, we thought it would be fun to commemorate this time by posting some of the coolest stats or facts we have found. Enjoy!

• The United States has the most Facebook users, with 125,881,220; followed closely by the United Kingdom and Indonesia.
• Al Pacino’s face was in the original header on the Facebook site
• To this day, no one knows exactly what the “poke” means (and it really creeps us out!)
• The third most popular age range of Facebook users are 35 to 44 years old
• The first Network options Facebook offered its users was Apple or Microsoft
• Ladies beat out the gentlemen with .02% more users
• The average user has 135 friends
• People spend about 500 billion minutes a month on Facebook…you’re on Facebook right now aren’t you?
• The country with the fastest growing use is the Phillipines
• Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s profile says he’s a Harvard Graduate…because, he said in an interview, there’s no feature for “Harvard Dropout”