How Facebook Took over the World

And how you can apply their techniques to your business.

Altaaf Aboo
8 min readSep 14, 2021

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Twitter hit 100 million active users in 2011 and 10 years later have 300 million users — That is awe-inspiring growth — They are one of the most popular social media networks globally.

However, compared to Facebook, they suddenly look slow and small

Facebook hit 100 million users in 2008, and four years later, in 2012, they hit 1 billion, and today they are approaching 3 billion active monthly users.

They have just not stopped growing. Most social media networks reach a saturation point of those interested in using their service. After that, they run out of new potential users, but Facebook has continued to grow year after year after year.

People have been calling the death of Facebook for the last ten years now, and not only have they not declined, but they have also continued to grow at the same incredible pace.

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The most unpopular social network has taken over the world.

Two billion people access Facebook daily. Given that there are just over four billion people with internet access globally, close to half of all people that have access to the internet in the world go on Facebook every single day.

Their closest competitor is Instagram, with 1,3 billion users, which they acquired in 2012.

After acquiring Instagram, it grew from 100 million users to a billion users by 2018. That’s just one year slower than the amazing feat that Facebook pulled off the first time.

You can get lucky the first time, but if you pull of the same feat twice, you must have a strategy.

That strategy is called growth hacking.

Traditional marketing is expensive

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Social media networks don’t make a lot of money per user. They need lot’s of users…

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Altaaf Aboo

www.altaafaboo.com — Join 100k other subscribers by signing up for my private newsletter and get free access to our growth insights and courses