Facebook community now officially 2-bn strong

The Facebook community is now officially two billion strong. ''As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people! We're making progress connecting the world, and now let's bring the world closer together. It's an honor to be on this journey with you'' Mark Zuckerberg said on his official Facebook page.

In May 2017, Facebook announced that it had 1.94 billion monthly active users, ahead of You Tube, which comes a distant second with 1.5 billion monthly users.

Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp (both owned by Facebook) between them count 1.2 billion monthly users, while the infamous Snapchat app, which everyone is trying to mimic stands at 255 million active users TechCrunch reported.

WeChat has 889 million users while Twitter is used by 328 million people.

In a press release issued by Facebook, product manager Guillermo Spiller said, ''Each day, more than 175 million people share a Love reaction, and on average,  over 800 million people like something on Facebook. More than 1 billion people use Groups every month''.

The press release added, ''To show our appreciation for the many ways people support one another on Facebook, we will share several personalised experiences over the coming days.''

Facebook's announcement comes at a time when it is trying to redefine its purpose, led by Zuckerberg who travelled to the US this year to better understand what people want out of the social network.

"We realise that we need to do more too," the Zuckerberg said in a recent interview with CNN Tech.

"It's important to give people a voice, to get a diversity of opinions out there, but on top of that, you also need to do this work of building common ground so that way we can all move forward together."