Fastest growing nation on Facebook? China!

王奋

The world’s largest social network may be blocked in the world’s most populous nation but – according to the latest stats from Social Bakers – China has been the fastest growing Facebook nation over the last three months.

Before attacking the messenger, Social Bake is a highly credible source of statistics on Facebook, which is why I did not dismiss this as an error not worth noting.

According to Social Bake, there are now 659,060 Facebook Users, ranking China as the 82nd largest nation on Facebook and a penetration 0.16% of the online population and 0.05% of the general population. To get an idea of scale, there are roughly 420mn netizens in China and 160mn users registered on Renren, the China-based social network aiming to IPO later this year.

Nations Social Bake places at a similar speed of growth are a catalog of African nations with troubled histories, such as Somalia, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic.

Social Bakers is not very clear about how they gather statistics for nation. I presume these are people who self-declare their location as China. To log onto Facebook from within China, users need to use a proxy service, which would show an IP location outside of China.

It would be interesting to know what has driven registration in recent months. Was it the film “The Social Network”? Are the new users students who return to China from overseas studies? (There were more than 130,000 Chinese students studying in the US in 2009)