Facebook: Now the #1 Social Network in the U.S.

It’s official. According to the most recent comScore data, Facebook is now the most popular social network in the United States. In May 2009, Facebook attracted over 70 million unique visitors — 2.8 million more than the month before.

By a number of accounts, Facebook has also surpassed 250 million members. This reflects a remarkable 25 precent increase in its user base over the last 60 days alone.

These numbers speak for themselves, but there are other definite signs as well that underscore Facebook’s ascendency in various social, cultural, and business spheres. One indicator is the sheer amount of media attention paid to the social network. Most recently, Facebook has been in the news for helping ordinary Iranian citizens organize themselves (in response to Iran’s recent presidential election) on a massive scale.

On the business side of things, search any media aggregator on any given day, and you’ll find a number of media articles that focus exclusively on the power of Facebook marketing. Doing Google News searches today for “Facebook marketing” and “Facebook Pages,” for example, immediately yields these article headlines among many others:

- “Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies” - Mashable
- “How to market on Facebook” - Examiner.com
- “Social Websites Now a Big Marketing Tool” - KFYR-TV (NBC Affiliate)
- “Staples Taps Facebook to Help Young Customers Give Back” - ClickZ
- “Facebook a key to college marketing” - eSchool News

So, putting the numbers and the anecdotes together, we know for sure that Facebook’s rising popularity is largely a function of its future promise and current applicability as an organizing tool, understood in the widest sense of that phrase: individuals are using Facebook to organize themselves, while businesses are using Facebook to find, organize, and grow their customer and enthusiast audiences in unprecedented ways.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!