Facebook claims 425 million mobile users

Published February 28, 2012 8:21am

Four months after it started, Facebook’s mobile platform has attracted at least 425 million users, the social networking giant claimed Tuesday (Manila time).

The Facebook Mobile platform has also sent 60 million users every month to social apps and games, Facebook mobile developer relations head James Pearce said in a blog post.

“(After four months), Facebook has 425 million monthly mobile users - and the platform sends more than 60 million visitors every month to apps and games. Mobile visitors were responsible for more than 320 million visits to mobile apps last month,” Pearce said.

He noted Facebook’s mobile users have been able to access many of their favorite Facebook apps and games from their smartphones.

Developers of mobile apps have embraced the platform for social discovery and are starting to benefit from the distribution it brings, he added.

Pearce said the power of social distribution is to help great apps and games reach new users “naturally” instead of being “curated” in app stores.

He said such a “natural” social distribution will make apps benefit from the re-engagement where users are easily encouraged to return to an app when their friends use it, share activity, or compete in social games.

“We have seen a rapid increase in visits for many types of apps and games using our social distribution channels - News Feed, bookmarks, requests and so on - a growth that is evident across both native and web apps,” he said. BranchOut, Diamond Dash

Pearce cited BranchOut, a social-professional networking web app, which he said sees more than 350,000 visitors from Facebook mobile every day. This traffic has already grown by a factor of 20 since the start of the year, he added.

Also, he cited Diamond Dash, a native iOS game by Berlin-based developer Wooga, which sees more than 1.9 million monthly visitors to their mobile app from Facebook.

“Daily traffic sent from Facebook mobile grew by a factor of three since they integrated with Facebook Platform and implemented Single Sign On,” he said.

Open Graph success

Pearce said many developers benefiting most from Facebook Platform are those building mobile Open Graph apps.

He said Timeline apps integrated with Open Graph are all about sharing moments in your life through the use of objects and actions posted to the Open Graph.

“And since many of the exciting activities in our lives happen while we are out and about, it is only natural that many of the interesting Timeline stories are those captured via mobile apps. These activities start discussions among friends that can drive more installs and engagement with the apps that make these conversations possible,” he said.

One example is Foodspotting, which lets people find, record and recommend food dishes.

Pearce said that with Single-Sign On integrated with Open Graph, Foodspotting have seen a “three-times increase” in the number of visits and activities shared on Facebook.

Even news and music apps benefit from mobile, he noted.

He cited The Washington Post Social Reader which used Open Graph to personalize the content that is presented.

“Across mobile and web, the Social Reader has benefitted greatly from Open Graph, receiving more than 10 million visitors from Facebook every month, and beating its launch targets fivefold,” he said.

Pearce even cited Yahoo!, which recently implemented Open Graph with their desktop Facebook app, which also sends traffic to their mobile web app.

Traffic to the mobile Yahoo! News web app from Facebook Mobile has increased three-and-a-half times since February 14th, to 1.6 million visitors a day, he said.

“All of these examples show that simple usage of Facebook Platform features like Single Sign On and Open Graph - together with the reach of Facebook’s social channels - can dramatically increase the uptake, usage, and re-engagement for mobile apps, regardless of platform,” he said. — RSJ, GMA News

Tags: facebook