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Facebook user growth slows for second consecutive month

June 13, 2011 — 8:23am ET | By Jason Ankeny

Although Facebook is closing in on the 700 million worldwide user benchmark, its growth slowed to 1.7 percent in May 2011, Inside Facebook reports. Over the last year Facebook has added an average of 20 million new users each month, but the social media platform welcomed only 11.8 million new additions last month, down from 13.9 million in April.

In all, Facebook boasts 687 million active users who log in to the site at least once per month. The U.S. had 149.4 million active Facebook users at the end of May, compared to 155.2 million at the beginning of the month, its first decline in the last year. Fifty-one percent of all Americans over the age of 12 are now on Facebook, up from just 8 percent only three years ago, according to a March report conducted by Arbitron, Inc. and Edison Research.

Inside Facebook adds that Canada's Facebook userbase fell by 1.52 million to 16.6 million, and the U.K., Norway and Russia also experienced declines in excess of 100,000 users each. Facebook is offsetting the losses with significant user gains in heavily populated emerging markets including Mexico, Brazil, India and Indonesia.

More than 250 million consumers are now actively using Facebook's mobile products across all platforms, up from only 65 million a year ago. In addition, Facebook is the most popular application across most operating systems according to Nielsen Company data published last year: Fifty percent of iOS users have accessed the app within the last 30 days, compared with 45 percent of BlackBerry users and 32 percent of Windows Phone users. In addition, Facebook is the second most popular app among Android users (45 percent)--only Google Maps ranks higher (46 percent).

For more:
- read this Guardian article