Facebook has achieved the 1 billion-user mark in recent months, which means that if Facebook were a country then it would be up there in terms of population with China. This amazing feat has been achieved even though China doesn’t allow Facebook they have their own version which is called Renren. This immediately discounts 1 billion possible users from the Facebook global brand.
Just think… an American university student created Facebook so that he could keep in touch with his friends when they went away to university in different parts of the country. Who’d have thought it would have made such a difference to so many people.
The Facebook story has been turned into a Hollywood blockbuster called the “The Social Network” and the creator of the website, Mark Zuckerberg, is now a billionaire. So it’s safe to say he has been quite successful with his idea in a very short space of time.
Facebook is so popular in our modern day lives that there have been news stories that some people are going to need therapy for their social networking addiction. This may be extreme but the amount of likes on the site currently stands at around the 1.1 trillion figure; which is obviously increasing by the second. 600 million of these users are mobile users so there is no escaping the Facebook epidemic that is taking the globe by storm. The median age of the users is 22, so this gives some indication of the types of people using the social networking site.
Twitter’s impact:
Social website Twitter is very different to Facebook and the main attraction to users on this particular site is the fact that many people’s favourite celebrities and heroes use this as a way of communicating with fans. The celebrities get their account verified so fans know that it isn’t a fake account. The attraction of this is that everyday people get an insight of the celebrity lifestyle and they can follow them around the globe every step of the way, without even leaving the comfort of their own home.
By going on Twitter celebrities can not only gain more fans but they can appeal to an astonishing amount of people. For example Lady Gaga has the most followers here with a 32 million total and counting. So one little tweet instantly reaches that amount of people. This makes it an easy platform to use, not only for fans to follow their idols, but also for celebrities to instantly promote themselves.
