Facebook- Once Users Go Mobile They Stay Mobile- Analysis of FB’s User Numbers by Platform

Looking at Facebook’s reported data since Q4 2012 it is clear that mobile really is driving growth, and digging in a little further it seems that as users transition to mobile, they tend to become primarily-mobile users, there are very few casually-mobile users of Facebook.

First a look at the PC-only users, people who in a given month only touch Facebook from a PC; these are falling both in absolute and, even more, in relative terms.

Facebook has grown strongly in this period: as these PC-only users have fallen- what has taken up the slack? Mobile-only users have more than replaced the lost PC-only users. On a daily basis, mobile-only users (DAUs or Daily Active Users) overtook other users (i.e. PC-only and people logging in on both platforms) at the end of 2013.

The trend is the same, but the picture is quite different, on a monthly basis (below). It is very clear that ALL the Facebook growth in the past 7 quarters has come from mobile-only users (MAUs, or Mobile Active Users), but there are apparently a much larger number of other (PC or multi-platform) users.

This relationship looks even stranger if you take one of Facebook’s own important metrics for engagement, the relationship between Monthly and Daily users, i.e. what proportion of monthly users are regular/daily users? As can be seen in the data table below, there are more mobile-only users on a daily basis than there are in a month. How can that be?

It seems clear that many users who are mobile-only on a particular day check in occasionally on a PC in a given month, while still using mobile on that day. But there is very little evidence of predominantly PC-based users occasionally checking in on mobile. If they did the absolute number of PC-only DAUs might be the same or higher than the PC-only MAUs, what we see is that those proportions are almost the same (so the absolute numbers are lower). The charts below show this clearly. Note how PC-only is the same proportion of daily and monthly use, while the mobile users are mostly purely-mobile viewed on a daily basis, but mostly multi-platform on a monthly basis.

This all seems broadly positive for Facebook- mobile monetization is improving, and as people shift away from PC, they are shifting towards mobile-only or mobile-first use. It does raise the question of the benefits of splitting messaging from the core mobile app experience. If messaging is a gateway drug for mobile Facebook usage, then you want people to be in the core experience, rather than letting them think that they can get what they want from a messaging app, while sticking with the core wall and status experience on the PC.

Notes-

All data from FB annual and quarterly reports.

One number (mobile only DAUs for Q3 2013) is estimated, as it has not been reported by Facebook.