U.S. Facebook Users Becoming More Mobile-Centric

Contrary to an erroneous report in The Guardian last week, Facebook isn’t losing users in the U.S. They’re just changing up their habits. According to figures provided to AllFacebook by Nielsen, Facebook users are shifting more of their social network time to their mobile devices and away from desktop. In March 2013, U.S. visitors to Facebook’s mobile application (Android & iOS) spent an average of 6 hours, 49 minutes on the site, compared to 6 hours, 44 minutes on average on desktop.

In March 2012, that desktop figure was 7 hours, 9 minutes per person on average.
Figures from Nielsen show that people are still highly connected to Facebook, but their attention is moving from desktop to mobile apps. It’s also an average, meaning the full spectrum is counted, from the super casual visitors to power users. These numbers track visitors, not so much the finite user count that Facebook measures. Time spent on Facebook is the most of any site on the web, and Nielsen said that number has been consistent over the past couple years.
Facebook’s desktop site had 142.1 million unique visitors this March — a figure that declined from March 2012, when the site had 152.8 million U.S. unique visitors.
In March 2013, Facebook’s mobile app (both iOS and Android) had 99 million U.S. unique users. Last year, there were only 62 million unique users in that same month.
It’s not just Facebook’s native app that is popular. Nielsen said that Instagram had 28.4 million users in March 2013. Facebook’s Messenger app (for both Android and iPhone) had 22 million unique users in March 2013.
Readers: Do you find you’re spending more time on Facebook on your smartphone than desktop?
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