Facebook is really a strange place. I think that most of the times we do not understand how big it is. Did I write big? Maybe huge is the right word here. There are users that have over 1.000 friends and some of them even reach the 5.000 limit so they have to create a second account to keep “connecting”. 

But most of us, who are social networking actively in Facebook, have around 150 friends to interact with, so sometimes we think that these 150 friends are the whole Facebook. It’s not. 

Here in Greece the growth rate of Facebook is amazing. From April 2009, when I wrote my first article about Facebook users in Greece, until now there are some 100.000 new users connecting to Facebook from a PC in Greece every month! Can you imagine that, 100.000 new Greek users every month! 

In April 2009 we were 1.322.480 Greeks in Facebook. Then in May 2009 the number was 1.482.200, for June 2009 1.618.860, September 2009 1.852.480 and in October 2009 1.958.680. 

Today (15/11/2009) the number of Facebook users connecting from a PC in Greece is 2.062.820!

The site has sustained a growth rate of 100.000 new users for one more month. According to the General Secretariat of the National Statistical Service of Greece the estimated population of Greece for the middle of 2008 is 11.237.068 (sorry there are no official data for 2009). This means that about 20% (18,35%) of the Greeks are using Facebook!

If you think that this number is impressive then you must know that in United States there are 95.300.340 Facebook users when the latest number for the population is 307.938.527 (1 out of 3)!

Naturally this growth in Facebook users in Greece is going to slow down at some point in the future. But we have some more interesting numbers that show that this is not going to happen in the next few months.

According to the latest data from the Observatory for the Greek Information Society in the first half of 2009 we had 41.137 new broadband connections every month in Greece.  The forecast for 1/1/2010 is that, with the worst possible scenario, 17.18% of Greek households will have broadband connections to the Internet.  Greece is still in 23th place between the 27 countries of European Union for broadband penetration but at that growth rate we will gain 1 to 3 places in the next 12 months! 

The numbers are clearly showing that Facebook and Social Media in general are growing fast. Old traditional media on the other hand are slowly dying.  Sometime in the near future you will have to get involved in this "Social Media frenzy" if you want your Brand to survive. Now it's the time to get prepared. Think about it. 

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