India outnumbers US, tops Facebook active users list

India has become the most important destination for California-based Facebook. According to the latest report, the platform hosts largest audience from India, higher than the United States.

Now Facebook’s total potential audience active users in India are 241 million, compared to 240 million in the United States.

According to the social media platform, it has now achieved more than two billion monthly users around the world.

The year 2017 has been impressive for Facebook in both the countries. However, the size of active users in India has been growing, more than twice as fast as they are in the United States.

With an addition of 50 million users, active users in India have increased by 27 per cent in the past six months alone while in the U.S around 26 million new users joined Facebook, up 12 per cent, over the same period.

Despite the recent growth in India, social media penetration in the country is still very low, only 19 percent of the country’s total population have used Facebook in the past month. However, that compares to 73 percent penetration in the United States, and a global average of around 42 percent.

Amidst the claim of increasing numbers, experts say that they noticed a few discrepancies in the numbers that Facebook reports for the same audiences across different parts of its advertising tool too, and some of these numbers don’t always make sense when compared to real-world populations either.

The numbers Facebook reports to advertisers change on a daily basis and the platform even reported a slight dip in global user numbers just before it announced its two billion active user milestone.

Besides, there is a sharp gender imbalance in active users of Facebook in India, where men represent three-quarters of the country’s active Facebook profiles.

The social networking site’s gender imbalance in India is in stark contrast to its US audience, where 54 percent of the platform’s active users are women.

Facebook’s active users in India also skew young, with more than half of the country’s users below the age of 25.

In June 2017, eMarketer released a study which highlighted the data on all the social networking websites.

WhatsApp, also from the Facebook, recently clocked over 200 million active users in India, making it the dominant market for the messenger app. Instagram’s active user base in India, while in its nascency, is around 31 million.

Facebook virtually dominates India’s social communication space. Four of its apps—WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Facebook and Facebook Lite—are among the top 10 most used apps in India, as per the Mary Meeker 2017 Internet Trends report.