Written by Chris Jacob:

In 2014, Facebook celebrated its 10th anniversary, making it one of the leading social platforms and a pioneer in social advertising. In those ten years, it’s gone from a college-only niche experience to a connected community for the entire world.

In our new e-book, The Unique Value of Facebook, we look closely at the ways Facebook connects you with your customers—and more than likely, a huge number of your potential customers are on Facebook!

This chart shows the huge surge in global numbers of Facebook users.

With over a billion active monthly users around the world, it’s likely that your customers, in any nation, are either regularly using Facebook or have close family and friends who do. An audience so large and highly engaged presents many opportunities for advertisers to reach both their ideal target segments and grow into markets using various sophisticated targeting and optimization features in the Facebook Ads offering.

Consider:

Facebook owns mobile.
One in five minutes on a mobile device is spent in Facebook’s app, which doesn’t include time spent on Facebook’s mobile website.

Facebook web access is strong.
Eleven percent of desktop web time is spent on Facebook, making it the largest social web property in the world.

The Facebook audience is vast.
Facebook has approximately 1.3 billion monthly active users, which dwarfs any channel in recorded history.

Facebook refers a ton of traffic.
Facebook accounts for up to 10% of referral traffic to major publishers.

Video and Facebook work together.
Facebook is the #2 video property online, behind only Google sites (led, of course, by YouTube).

With numbers like these, it’s clear why brands continue to flock to Facebook to reach potential and current brand fans. For new ideas on how to capitalize on the many available features of the world’s most popular social network, check out our charts and examples of Facebook’s unique value.