Facebook’s monthly active user count is a curious statistic, one we have referenced to demonstrate the usage of different Facebook applications.
Until recently, Facebook’s algorithm would incorporate user likes and comments, inflating the number of monthly active users of an app, even if they weren’t actively using it.
As of last Friday, Facebook has changed the way it counts active users, dismissing likes and comments on stream content published by applications. Whilst some apps will already reflect the change, Facebook says that re-calculations are still in progress meaning some apps will still report older statistics.
As InsideFacebook reports, mobile apps will be the most affected because their very nature is to help generate new content that gets a lot of likes, shares and comments. It will also give us a clearer view on just how many real active users there are of the official Facebook for iPhone app, as well as the KIN and the Windows Phone 7 apps.
It’s a good move by Facebook but one that should have been in place from the start.
Not too surprising, well the fact that the numbers are skewed, not that Facebook may be fixing it, which is rather surprising ;) Seriously though, I agree they should have done this a while ago. Seems like a trend with Facebook, do what you can without too much thought and fix it later if you get caught…
Hey I’m kind of confused about the difference between monthly active users vs. likes (fans). If my page has 4000 likes and 5400 monthly active users, how can this be explained?
Christie – that could be because 5,400 have liked the page during the month, but 1,400 have unliked it during the time.
Or it could be that MAUs includes visitors to the page, irrespective of whether they have liked it.