India now the biggest user of Facebook, overtakes the US

The number of active Facebook users in India is up 27 percent in the past six months. (AFP)

DUBAI: India has become biggest market for Facebook with 241 million active monthly users of the online social media and social networking service, overtaking the US market with 240 million subscribers.
Facebook has achieved impressive growth in both India and the US since the start of 2017, but the latest figures suggest that active users in India are growing more than twice as fast as they are in the US, noted a report prepared by HootSuite and WeAreSocial for advertisers.
Active users in India are up 27 percent in the past six months compared with a growth of 12 percent in the US over the same period.
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, earlier announced that social network he founded in 2004 has reached the 2 billion-user milestone, or roughly equal to two-thirds of the world’s population with Internet access.
Social media penetration in India however remains relatively low where only 19 percent, or 241 million of the subcontinent’s 1.282 billion population, are active social media users. In comparison, 73 percent of the US’s 327 million population are active on social media.
The report also noted Brazil is the third biggest market for Facebook with 139 million active users monthly, followed by Indonesia with 126 million; Mexico with 86 million; the Philippines with 69 million; Vietnam with 64 million; Thailand with 57 million; Turkey with 56 million and the UK with 44 million active subscribers.
Facebook, meanwhile, has rolled out Messenger Lite in India, almost nine months after its global debut. The app was first rolled out in countries like Kenya, Tunisia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Venezuela in October last year.
Messenger is the world’s second largest messaging app after WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook, with each app boasting an active user base of more one billion subscribers.
Facebook’s Messenger Lite is aimed at devices with low-end hardware and places with slower Internet speeds, but offers the same capability for users to send and receive text, photos, links, emojis and stickers, aside from supporting for voice calls.
“Messenger Lite is a solution for people who don’t have the latest smartphone, but still want to stay connected to their friends and family,” the Facebook earlier said in a statement.