Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

I admit it, it's a bugbear of mine. You're halfway through a conversation about using the web to get a message across to a group of people, and everyone's nodding along.

Then you just happen to drop into the conversation that there's no need to build a campaign microsite, that Facebook would be a better way of reaching people, because it's always on, and it can do almost everything a conventional site can (Actually with iFrames it can actually do everything a conventional site can, and with Fpay you can even pay on it without leaving the 'always on' environment.)

And then someone says: 'But I don't think my audience is on Facebook...' And it's goodbye a sensible solution using  a medium to which everyone has access, and hello to another dead microsite floating in cyberspace.

So let's make this clear: everybody is on Facebook.

And more of them are joining every day.

According to a leaked memo from Goldman Sachs to its clients, Facebook already had 600 million users by the end of last year. By February 2011 it had 650 million. That's one in ten of everybody on the planet. And none of those people are in China, hardly any in Africa or South America. So it's much closer to a third or even a half of all the people in the north-west of the globe.

And those are just the figures that Facebook admits to. There is a strong suspicion that Mr Zuckerberg is holding back his figures to make a more dramatic impression. Like a billion users.

It's already the largest and fastest growing mobile internet site in the UK. In 2010, the number of mobile users on Facebook more than doubled from 2009. Google what? Facebook has more than twice as many users. In many ways, it could justifiable lay claim to being the future of the mobile internet.

Facebook isn't perfect, of course. And it isn't fully accessible.

But the next time somebody asks 'is my audience on Facebook?' you know the answer.