50% Of Britons Use Facebook

British Facebook users are known to be among the most enthusiastic fans of social networking. Everyone is on Facebook, we often hear. Although it sounds pretty vague this is not far from the truth, as it turns out.

New research from Experian Hitwise provides an excellent snapshot of UK Facebook demographics, revealing exactly who is on Facebook. Let’s take a look:

There are 30,945,100 UK users on Facebook, which is roughly half the population of the country. Women are slightly better represented than men, with 52% of UK users being female. In terms of age, 26% fall within the 25-35 age group, followed closely by the 18-24-year-olds, who account for 24% of the total UK user database. The combined share of those aged 45 and over comes in at 22%, which some people might find surprising. Manchester residents are 9% more likely to visit the site than other Britons.

Looking at usage, there are several figures that stand out. There are more than 1.3 billion visits to Facebook from the UK every month, with an average of 40 million users visiting every day. This means that the UK population spends 500 million hours on Facebook every month and each user spends 22 minutes on the site per visit.

More broadly, Experian finds that one fan of a page brings on average 20 more visitors to it over a period of 12 months. In the UK, Facebook is the second most visited page after Google. Facebook is also the most searched-for term across all search engines and three of the top 10 searches are connected to the social network.