While Facebook crossed 500 million user base mark worldwide, it has also shown very positive growth in India and has touched 12 million mark as on yesterday. Users in India are uploading more than 53 million photos in a month and even mobile usage has increased nine-fold in the past year.
Facebook India page officially announced this 12 million figure yesterday along with the Facebook-Stories of two Indian celebrities – Deepika Padukon & A.R.Rahman (Uh, Bollywood has to come when it comes to launch any new initiative in India). This Facebook-Stories is a new initiative from Facebook as part of their 500 million success celebration wherein users can share their own stories about impact of Facebook on their lives and read hundreds of others, categorized by themes and locations around the world. As I’m typing this post, I can already see count of stories from India increasing with each refresh.
Though India has reached 12 million users for Facebook but when it comes to overall population penetration, India is still way behind as compared to other countries. Here’s an interesting interactive map for you to see the penetration of Facebook in different countries along with a table having data for country, Facebook users, population, and percentage penetration. This low penetration is obvious enough considering the overall internet penetration of India.
Image Source: Though the data here is old by a few days, it shows India with 10.5 million users, so with this new 12 million mark, the percentage penetration will become close to 1% now.