A report released by the World Internet Stats in its global 2011 Facebook usage report has shown that the number of Nigerian Facebook users has increased from 400, 000 in the last four years to 4.3 million at the end of December 2011.
According to the report, Nigeria maintains third position in terms of the number of Facebook users in the African continent, coming behind Egypt and South Africa with 9.4 million and 4.8 million users respectively.
Morocco comes fourth with 4.1 million Facebook users; Algeria with 2.8 million users maintaining fifth position while Tunisia recorded 2.7 million Facebook users at the end of December, 2011 making it the sixth in the continent.
Ghana also beat other African countries with a 1.1 million Facebook subscriber mark recorded in the country as at end of 2011.
The latest report says social media continue to grow and in the leading position is Facebook with 799 million subscribers at end of 2011 contending that the networking sites allow people across the world to share photographs and videos and post regular updates of their movements and thoughts.
Earlier in October 2011, an International Telecommunication Union report has shown that with a total of 3.7 million users, Nigeria ranks 37th in the world when it comes to the number of Facebook users per country. Egypt and South Africa are the two countries that are ahead of Nigeria in Facebook usage, with 8.5 million and 4.3 million users respectively.
In the report entitled: 'Measuring the Information Society Report" and signed by Director of Telecommunications Development Bureau, at ITU, Mr. Brahima Sanou, the United States of America leads the pack with 154 million users on the global ranking.
"Statistics on the number of Facebook users are widely cited, especially given their impressive growth rates over the past few years, but little is published about how those statistics are compiled, or what they actually represent," the ITU noted in its report.
"For example, a comparison of Facebook user data and internet user data for some developing countries show there to be as many Facebook users as internet users, whereas it can reasonably be assumed that not every internet user is also on Facebook. How then can these numbers be explained?"
