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Top 10 countries in Facebook adoption: December 2011

Can you list the top 10 countries in terms of Facebook adoption? The results surprised me: I had an idea where Facebook could be popular, but would definitely not have picked these 10.
Written by Emil Protalinski, Contributor

What countries have the highest Facebook penetration rate, meaning the largest percentage of their population on the social network? The top 10 list is as follows: Cyprus, Hong Kong, Chile, Singapore, Norway, Denmark, the US, Canada, the UK, and Sweden.

Pingdom came up with the chart above after taking data on how many Facebook users there are in countries around the world from Socialbakers', data on Internet users from the World Bank, and data on country populations from Wikipedia. Only countries with a population of more than 500,000 were counted, and countries for which the World Bank doesn't report any Internet users were removed, leaving a list of 150 countries.

As you can see in the chart above, the yellow bars show the top 10 countries in terms of what percentage of the population is on Facebook. The red bars show the number of Facebook users in each country as a percentage of Internet users, which is of course higher than the yellow bars.

21 out of the 150 countries showed more Facebook users than Internet users (such as Chile above). This could be an anomaly in how the data was compiled but it could also mean that Internet users are hoarding multiple Facebook accounts.

The biggest untapped markets are of course China, where Facebook is still blocked, and India, where just 3.42 percent of the country's population is on the social network. These are the two countries with the largest populations in the world. If Facebook were a country itself, it would be listed third, with a population of over 800 million monthly active users.

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