In just a few short years, Facebook has dominated the Web. The site has over 1 billion users, and millions of people use the Web site for everything from playing games to connecting with friends. Now, the social network is attempting to conquer the mobile frontier, and its efforts may finally be starting to pay off.
At the LeWeb conference in Paris this week, Facebook announced some impressive stats about its mobile operations in 2012. The company has traditionally been weak in mobile since the market started to shift to smartphones and tablets, but it looks like Facebook is starting to hit its stride if the stats released this week are any indication.
Before getting into that, however, Facebook announced that its Web operations are still going strong. There are now over 350 apps with more than 1 million monthly active users. It can be assumed that most of these are games, but other kinds of apps are also becoming increasingly popular.
As for mobile, it’s getting pretty impressive. Facebook announced that over 200,000 iOS and Android apps are now integrated with Facebook, including nine of the top 10 grossing iPhone apps. Speaking of which, over 45 percent of the top 400 grossing iOS apps are using the Facebook SDK in some capacity.
Facebook notes 2012 was the year of the social lifestyle app. The introduction of Open Graph makes it easy for users to share their lives with friends, and lifestyle apps are capitalizing on that in a big way. Facebook notes that apps like Endomondo, Deezer and Shazam have seen millions of shares and impressions since integrated Open Graph.
After living so long on the Web, it’s going to take a while for Facebook to fully transition to mobile. The stats announced this week show that the social network is off to a good start. Even so, mobile is only going to continue to grow in dominance in 2013, and Facebook has to be ready to capitalize on it. If not, some small start up could move in and steal the mobile market away from under its nose.