A recent Facebook blog post estimated that there were over 150 million Facebook users interacting with the service via their mobile devices.
It now appears the company were a little conservative in their estimates, with figures from the official application pages of the Facebook clients on different smartphones showing that the total was a lot higher than what was quoted.
The Facebook page for its iPhone application shows 102.2 million monthly active users, with 57.5 million users utilising Facebook for BlackBerry, 11.9 million actively using its Android app and 2.6 million using its Palm webOS application.
The figures quoted above total 174.2 million monthly active users, numbers that don’t include users of different third party applications for devices like the Sidekick, or any Nokia handset as they do not have official Facebook application pages.
It’s another feather in the cap for the mobile industry with one in five Facebook users now accessing the social network from a mobile device. Mobile use is only set to boom as the smartphone market continues to grow and manufacturers look for new ways to connect users to their favourite social networks.
Update: We have had a number of responses from readers suggesting that the number of Facebook for iPhone users cannot be quite as high as 102 million. The iPod Touch also runs iOS and can download iPhone apps, which could push the total higher than the 60 million+ iPhone handsets sold.
We have also looked into how Monthly Active Users are calculated. A Monthly Active User is a unique user who accesses the application in the last 30 days. Apparently, if a Facebook user visits the Application Page whilst logged in but doesn’t authorise the app, that user is still counted as a unique user. This could inflate numbers reported by the application.
Ummm, unless according to Apple they have “only” sold just over 60M iphones so far…
Remember that the app can also be installed on the iPod Touch, this could account for the extra devices using the application.
Usually when we talk about users we mean unique visitors within 24 or 48 hours. So it could be that facebook uses that metric? So instead of 102m unique people they mean more like 10m uniques that frequently visit the site. Not sure but 102m sounds like an awful lot.
A fair point. According to AllFacebook, Monthly Active Users (MAU) refers to the number of unique users in a 30 day period. However, a MAU can be generated by visiting the applications page without actually authorising it.
This could account for an inflated number of users.
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