200 Million+ on Facebook

Now here’s a stat: as of this week Facebook officially has over 200 million active users. Perhaps even more amazing, Facebook has doubled its user base in the last eight months alone.

That’s tremendous growth for a five-year-old company.

Mark Zuckerberg has marked this occasion with a blog and video retrospective that discusses his company’s world-changing tools. He discusses how Facebook has empowered decentralized groups to organize themselves and widen their reach immensely: he uses the particular example of Colombia, where in 2008 a young group of activists used Facebook in order to mobilize and turn out hundreds of protesters against FARC, a Colombian terrorist group.

Such viral community building, if you will, is something that brands can do as well for the sake of their bottom lines.

We’ve hit on this point a number of times on this blog, but the reminder is an important one: given the relatively low costs (in terms of money and resources) of marketing on Facebook; given the sharing and engagement tools that Facebook and Facebook-involved companies have provided any organization that wants to spread its marketing messages; and given the state of the advertising industry, where the big players are building competitive advantages by moving dollars from traditional media to digital media — given all of this, brands now have every incentive to engage Facebook’s 200+ million user base.

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