Half of UK population to use Facebook this year

This year an estimated 50.5% of UK residents – some 33.2 million users – will log on to Facebook at least once a month, according to eMarketer.

The research firm said this is up from 49.5% in 2015, with the proportion of UK Facebook users to rise slightly to 52% of the population by 2020.

By comparison, Twitter will have 14.3 million UK users logging on regularly in 2016, up from 13.2 million or 25.5% of the UK population in 2015, according to eMarketer.

The survey said that another important milestone for Facebook this year is that more than half of UK mobile phone users (50.8%) will be Facebook users. Some 81.1% of UK Facebook users will also access the platform through a mobile phone this year, with that figure climbing to 88.0% by 2020.

“People are spending more time than ever with mobile devices. It stands to reason that Facebook users are heading to the mobile platform, too. Indeed, such is the ubiquity of these devices that the default platform for the vast majority of Facebook users is now mobile,” said eMarketer’s UK analyst Bill Fisher.