SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc (FB.O) said on Tuesday that 2 billion people are regularly using its flagship service, marching past another milestone in its growth from a college curiosity in the United States to the world’s largest social media network.

3D-printed models of people are seen in front of a Facebook logo in this photo illustration taken June 9, 2016. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg disclosed the number to his followers in a Facebook post. "It's an honor to be on this journey with you," he wrote. (bit.ly/2sefWFL)

The user base is bigger than the population of any single country, and of six of the seven continents. It represents more than a quarter of the world’s 7.5 billion people.

Facebook defines a monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through its website or a mobile device, or used its Messenger app, in the past 30 days. It does not include people who use the Instagram or WhatsApp networks but not Facebook.

The company said in May that duplicate accounts, according to an estimate from last year, may have represented some 6 percent of its worldwide user base.

The social network’s user population dwarfs that of similar companies. Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) reported in April monthly active users of 328 million, while Snap Inc’s (SNAP.N) Snapchat had 166 million daily users at the end of the first quarter.

WeChat, a unit of Tencent Holdings Ltd (0700.HK) and a widely used service in China, said in May that it had 938 million monthly active users in the first quarter.

Facebook had 1.94 billion people using its service monthly as of March 31, an increase of 17 percent from a year earlier. It reached 1 billion in October 2012.

The company, which Zuckerberg started in 2004 in his college dorm room, uses its huge size advantage to lure advertisers, offering them highly targeted marketing capabilities based on its data about users.

The number of advertisers topped 5 million in April, the company said.

Facebook’s growth has increasingly come from outside the United States, Canada and Europe. Three years ago, those regions accounted for some 38 percent of users, compared with about 30 percent in the first quarter of this year.

To increase penetration rates in developing nations, Facebook has rolled out pared-down versions of its apps that use less data, and it has been developing solar-powered drones to extend internet connectivity around the planet.</s>CBS Loca l– Mark Zuckerberg announced on Facebook that his platform now has two billion active users, and it’s the first social media platform to reach that number.

Facebook launched 13 years ago and hit the 1 billion users mark just five years ago. There are 7.5 billion living, breathing humans on planet Earth, and now one-third of them are active Facebook users. To further accentuate Facebook’s ubiquitous presence in the world, only 3.2 billion people globally have access to the internet, according to the BBC.

“As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people!” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook account. “We’re making progress connecting the world, and now let’s bring the world closer together. It’s an honor to be on this journey with you.”

Behind Facebook, YouTube is best positioned to surpass the two billion benchmark as they have 1.5 billion users. Tied for third at 1.2 billion is WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, and the Facebook Messenger app.

Here’s how they all stack up against each other by way of active monthly users, via TechCrunch.

Facebook-owned Instagram has more users, 700 million, than Twitter, 328 million, and Snapchat, 225 million, with the latter valued somewhere between $25 billion and $34 billion.

Follow us on Twitter | Like us on Facebook</s>SAN FRANCISCO Facebook said on Tuesday that 2 billion people are regularly using its flagship service, helping it march past another milestone in its growth from a college curiosity in the US to the world's largest social media network.

"It's an honour to be on this journey with you," he wrote.

The user base is bigger than the population of any single country, and of six of the seven continents. It represents more than a quarter of the world's 7.5 billion people.

Facebook defines a monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through its website or a mobile device, or used its Messenger app, in the past 30 days. It does not include people who use the Instagram or WhatsApp networks, but not Facebook.

The company said last month that duplicate accounts, according to an estimate from last year, may have represented some 6 per cent of its worldwide user base.

The social network's user population dwarfs that of similar companies - Twitter reported in April monthly active users of 328 million, while Snapchat had 166 million daily users at the end of the first quarter.

WeChat, a unit of Tencent and a widely-used service in China, said last month that it had 938 million monthly active users in the first quarter.

Facebook had 1.94 billion people using its service monthly as of March 31, an increase of 17 per cent from a year earlier.

The company, which Mr Zuckerberg started in 2004 in his college dorm room, uses its huge size advantage to lure advertisers, offering them highly-targeted marketing capabilities based on its data about users.

The number of advertisers topped 5 million in April, the company said.</s>About 25% of the world’s population is now logging into Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) at least once a month. Crossing 2 billion monthly active users (MAUs) should come as no surprise, as Facebook was already on the threshold at the end of the first quarter, when it had 1.94 billion MAUs. Of those, 1.2 billion were daily active users (DAUs)

It’s hard to overstate how incredible Facebook’s scale is. Reaching such a critical mass of users is Facebook’s most important advantage over rivals, which continue to struggle growing their own respective user bases despite being but a fraction of Facebook’s. The challenge is that other social media companies are more selective in what user metrics they’re willing to disclose, which impedes comparability.

Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) discloses MAUs (328 million at the end of the first quarter) but not DAUs; Snap (NYSE: SNAP) discloses DAUs (166 million at the end of the first quarter) but not MAUs.

It’s worth acknowledging why Facebook is so much larger than Twitter or Snapchat. The social network was always intended to be a mainstream platform that is extremely approachable with a user-friendly interface that’s relatively intuitive. Twitter still refuses to abandon its arbitrary 140-character limit, which is probably the biggest hurdle to usability (who isn’t sick of trying to follow a tweetstorm with branching responses?). Snapchat’s interface is notoriously confusing, and first investor Jeremy Liew said this is intentional “because it breaks traditional metaphors and conventions for app design,” which Liew argues is precisely why it’s so popular among teens and younger users.

By appealing to the mainstream, Facebook has reached an unprecedented and unparalleled scale for a social media company. And seeing as how advertisers follow users, the financial benefits are quite obvious as well.

Additionally, Facebook is just one of the company’s expanding portfolio of social platforms, albeit the core flagship one. Messenger and WhatsApp now boast over 1 billion MAUs each, both hitting the 1 billion milestone last year. While Messenger and WhatsApp aren’t contributing a whole lot financially quite yet, as Facebook is still ironing out its monetization strategy, Instagram is well on its way to becoming the company’s fourth billion-user platform (Instagram hit 700 MAUs in April).

Instagram is becoming quite important, particularly as photo/video sharing services lend themselves rather well to ad monetization. Instagram’s advertiser base hit 1 million in March.

Well done, Zuck Dawg. Well done.

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Evan Niu, CFA owns shares of Facebook. Evan Niu, CFA has the following options: long January 2019 $20 puts on Snap Inc. and long January 2018 $120 calls on Facebook. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Facebook and Twitter. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.</s>WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Facebook, the world's largest social network, reached the milestone of 2 billion monthly users.



The number of users increased from the 1.94 billion that the company reported in its earnings report in May.



'As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people! We're making progress connecting the world, and now let's bring the world closer together. It's an honor to be on this journey with you,' Mark Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook page.



Facebook's other social networking sites are also doing well, with Facebook Messenger currently boasting of 1.2 billion monthly users and WhatsApp also having almost same number of users. In comparison, Twitter has 328 million monthly active users, while Instagram has over 700 million and Snapchat 255 million.



The company reports that about 66 percent of Facebook's monthly users visit the site each day, compared to 55 percent when the company had 1 billion monthly users.



'Each day, more than 175 million people share a Love reaction, and on average, over 800 million people like something on Facebook. More than 1 billion people use Groups every month,' said Guillermo Spiller, Product Manager.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX</s>“We’re getting to a size where it’s worth really taking a careful look at what are all the things that we can do to make social media the most positive force for good possible,” Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox told TechCrunch about the company’s new milestone. 13 years after launching and less than 5 years after hitting 1 billion, Facebook now has 2 billion monthly active users.

Facebook wants people to celebrate with a personalized “Good Adds Up” video they can make and share here. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg played it cool with this brief announcement message.

2 billion makes Facebook the largest social app in terms of logged-in users, above YouTube’s 1.5 billion, WeChat’s 889 million, Twitter’s 328 million, and Snapchat’s estimated 255 million (extrapolated from its December 2015 ratio when it had 110 million daily and 170 million monthly users). Beyond YouTube, only Facebook’s other apps have more than 1 billion, including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger with 1.2 billion each. Instagram might soon join that club as it recently rocketed past 700 million.

Facebook’s growth the last half decade has been fueled by the developing world. The company has relentlessly optimized its app for cheap Android smartphones and low bandwidth connections. It’s added 746 million users in Asia and the Rest Of World region since hitting 1 billion users total. Meanwhile it only added 41 million in the US and Canada.

Despite Facebook’s size and age, at 17% its user count is growing as fast or faster than any year since 2012. And people aren’t using it less either. In fact, 66% of Facebook’s monthly users return each day now compared to 55% when it hit 1 billion. If the teenaged social network isn’t as cool to teenagers any more, it’s not showing in the big metrics.

But neither does the colossal impact Facebook has had on society, which it’s now trying to bend towards positivity with its new mission statement to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

“There’s a deep sense of responsibility in every part of the company” Cox told TechCrunch. “We’re getting to the scale where we have to get much better about understanding how the product has been used.” That’s why he’s been traveling around the world doing user research. And it’s why Mark Zuckerberg has been criss-crossing the country on a listening tour that many people cynically assume is the start to a run for President, despite the CEO’s denials.

Yet perhaps stewarding a 2 billion person community is responsibility enough to get out of Silicon Valley and figure out how Facebook impacts people’s lives.

There are the big, newsy things like suicides on Facebook Live and fears that fake news got Donald Trump elected. But deeper down, there are even more complex ramifications of a near ubiquitious social network. It can propel internet addiction, and facilitate the filter bubbles that polarize society by reinforcing our opinions.

If getting to 1 billion was about building a product, and getting to 2 billion was about building a user base, Facebook’s responsibility is to build empathy between us at it reaches for 3 billion.</s>Facebook relishes the feat of achieving 2 billion monthly active users with renewed efforts thanks to its loyal fans who have helped the company reach the grand milestone. The popular social media site has reached the new milestone from 1.94 billion users that the company quoted in its recent earnings report in May.

Facebook's growth seems phenomenal as the company's WhatsApp messenger has crossed over 1.2 billion monthly users while Twitter and Instagram pale out in comparison with 328 million and 700 million monthly active users respectively.

In appreciation of achieving this remarkable feat, Facebook is planning to roll out personalised videos for all its users in the next few days. As a token of thanking its users for their incredible support over the years, Facebook will also plan to share custom videos and stats of those people who inspired fellow Facebook users.

Facebook users will be greeted with thank you messages whenever they love a friend's post with the heart emoji or wish someone a happy birthday or create a new group. The company seems to be headed in the right direction with its key motto of community building and growth strategies.</s>Facebook has hit another milestone. Its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerburg says the Facebook community officially has two billion monthly users.

And that's without China because Facebook is banned in China.

Two billion monthly users makes Facebook the largest social app in terms of logged-in users.

It was just five years ago that the company hit one billion users. Facebook was founded 13 years ago.</s>Facebook has announced that it now has two billion monthly users.

The company reached the milestone today, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealing the news in a post on his Facebook page.

"As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people!" he wrote.

"We're making progress connecting the world, and now let's bring the world closer together.

"It's an honor to be on this journey with you."

The company was founded in February 2004, and reached one billion users in October 2012.

More than 800 million people now 'Like' something on the site each day.

To mark the occasion, Facebook has started rolling out new features that users will gain access to over the coming days.

One of these is the Good Adds Up personalised video, which features "inspiring stories of people using Facebook to bring communities together".

Another is Celebrating The Good People Do. "After someone reacts to a friend’s post with Love, wishes someone happy birthday or creates a group, they will see a message in News Feed thanking them," says the site.

Facebook has made it its mission to get people to join more groups and communities on the site.

According to Mr Zuckerberg, 100 million users are currently part of "meaningful communities", but he wants that figure to rise to a billion.

Key to this change will be group administrators, who the Facebook CEO compared to pastors.

“As I've travelled around and learned about different places, one theme is clear: every great community has great leaders. Think about it. A church doesn't just come together. It has a pastor who cares for the well-being of their congregation, makes sure they have food and shelter.”</s>MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook is reaching another milestone, announcing that it now has more than 2 billion users.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the new marker was reached early Tuesday and in a Facebook post said that he’s proud of the role his company is playing in connecting people around the world.

Facebook says more than 175 million people declare they “love” something on the site daily and an average of more than 800 million people hit Facebook’s like button.

Facebook users will likely see a personalized video celebrating the milestone in the next few days.

The Menlo Park, Calif., company is putting more emphasis on creating virtual communities within the site while it also works to reduce violent, hateful and misleading content on the service.
Facebook, Inc. announces that its social media service now has 2 billion regular users, more than a quarter of the world's population. Twitter, by comparison, has 328 million users as of April 2017.