Around 265,420 Icelanders are registered as users of the social network Facebook. According to Statistics Iceland, the country has 318,236 inhabitants, which means that 83 percent of the nation uses Facebook. The percentage is among the highest in the world.
Photo by Páll Stefánsson.
The number of Facebook users increased rapidly in 2010. In summer their overall number exceeded 500 million and now Facebook boasts 580 million users worldwide. There were 150,000 Icelandic users last year and so there has been an explosion in registrations in Iceland, Fréttabladid reports.
“The biggest change is that we are willingly giving up personal information and instead get the chance to follow people around it,” PR agent Andrés Jónsson, who monitors the development of social networks, commented on their character. “I call it digital closeness. It is positive because closeness is always good.”
If Icelandic Facebook users are compared to those in the other Nordic countries, it turns out that their percentage is much higher than in our neighboring countries: 53 percent in Norway, 48 percent in Denmark, 45 percent in Sweden and 35 percent in Finland, according to socialbakers.com.
