Inside Facebook report shows more Canadians dropping Facebook

Toronto - New reports from Inside Facebook shows that a fewer number of Canadians are using the social networking juggernaut Facebook. The report further showed that Facebook is only 13 million away from 700 million global users.

A recently published Inside Facebook reports that on an international level, Facebook has grown substantially and some of the top gainers from May 2011 to June 2011 were Mexico (25.6 million users), Brazil (19 million users), India (26.6 million users) and Indonesia (37.9 million users). The figures have been a growing trend for Facebook within the past year because many of these nations have only recently been exposed to the social networking website. Overall growth, though, has been down for the second straight month, which is something that has perplexed executives. In the United States, Facebook lost almost six million users from 155.2 million (May 1) to 149.4 million (May 31). Its northern border neighbour also lost a large number of users. At the end of May, in Canada Facebook lost 1.52 million users from 18.2 million users. Facebook lost approximately 100,000 users in Norway, Russia and the United Kingdom. The report notes that a lot of these nations joined Facebook years ago. “If these countries — most of whom had adopted Facebook many years ago — had not lost users, and instead posted even small gains, Facebook would have had a much more typical month,” noted the report. In an interview with the Canadian Press earlier this year, managing director at Facebook Canada, Jordan Banks, said that he didn’t think Facebook would see any steep decline in Canada. “I don't think we're plateauing at all, when you take a look at the engagement metrics — that's everything from how many times they come in a given month, to how much time they spent, pages (viewed) — it continues to grow at a very rapid rate,” said Banks. “There's still room to grow on the absolute number of Canadians that use Facebook, as well as when they use it, and using it more often in a more engaged way. And we see that happening.”