The brands that are bigger than Facebook

One in seven people in the world used Facebook on Monday, according to the social media website’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook says it has 1.49 billion active users every month but 1 billion logging on to the site in just 24 hours is a new high for the US company. Nevertheless, there are still a few brands that touch more people’s lives daily.

Take Colgate. According to research by Kantar, 65% of the world’s population choose the toothpaste brand.

With the very rough presumption that most people brush their teeth every day, we reckon that must tot up to around several billion daily users at least. Good news for dentists.

In less good news for dentists, Coca-Cola says it sells 1.9bn units of its huge range of beverages every single day around the world, although that figure also includes its fruit juice and water brands.

Heading into the digital sphere, Windows posts some comparable numbers to Facebook. Microsoft estimates that 1.5 billion people use the software’s various iterations daily. It also has 1.2 billion users of its Office suite, but that is in total rather than every 24 hours.

Putting IRL to one side, Facebook is by far the most dominant social media site in terms of active users. Every month it gets five times the number of visitors that Twitter does. The only site that comes close to it is video-streaming site YouTube, which has 1 billion people active on its service every month.

Facebook’s Messenger application, which is linked to but independent of the main service, had 700 million users in June according to Zuckerberg. That puts it just behind Chinese instant messaging service QQ (843m) as well as WhatsApp (800m), another service owned by Facebook.

The last time Facebook competitor Google+ released numbers on its active user base was in 2013, when it said it had 540 million using it monthly. However, that figure also included those using their profiles to comment on affiliated sites such as YouTube. The number actually visiting the Google+ stream was lower, at 300 million.

While the world might find its teeth a bigger priority than connecting with friends online, there is no doubt that Facebook’s billion-in-a-day is unparalleled in the world of social media.