It’s the site that connects us to millions of people across the world – right from our mobile phones.

From its unlikely beginnings, Facebook has become a global powerhouse that helps us share ideas and connections with anyone across the world.

But do you know when Facebook began? Or some of the mind-boggling statistics that tell us just how big the site really is?

Here, we take a look at some of the top facts about the social media platform that will have you hitting the like button…

  • Facebook was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard College roommates.
  • The site was initially called Facemash, then Thefacebook.
  • By December 2004, one million users were active on the site.
  • Facebook for mobile was launched in 2006.
  • In 2007, former Harvard classmates Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss sue Zuckerberg in federal court, alleging that he stole the idea for Facebook from them. The two sides later agree to a $65 million settlement.
  • The ‘like’ button was introduced in 2009, changing Facebook forever.
  • For one week in early 2012, according to a study, Facebook changed the content mix in the news feed of approximately 690,000 users and manipulated the content to gauge the user’s emotional response. The study found that users who were shown negative content were slightly more likely to produce negative posts. Users in the positive group responded with more upbeat posts.
  • In 2015, Facebook hits a milestone when one billion users log in to the social network in a single day.
  • Every second there are 20,000 people on Facebook. This means in just 18 minutes there are 11 million users on Facebook.
  • On average there are 486,183 users a minute accessing Facebook from their mobile.
  • Facebook is adding 7,246 people every 15 minutes or eight per second.
  • Every 15 minutes there are over 49 million posts. To be precise 49,433,000 or 3 million posts per minute.
  • People share 1.3 million pieces of content on Facebook every minute of every day.
  • In November of 2014the number of video uploads to Facebook exceeded YouTube video uploads.
  • Facebook has 33,606 employees.
  • Since 2012, Facebook has spent well over $22.4 billion buying competitors such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. That’s just what we know of as well. There have been lots of acquisitions where the cost was undisclosed.
  • Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is a whopping $55.6 billion, yet his salary is only $1 a year.
  • Worldwide, 26.3 per cent of the online population use Facebook.
  • The most popular page is the Facebook main page with 213m likes. Samsung is second with 159m, while Cristiano Ronaldo is third with 122m.
  • In a month, the average user likes 10 posts, makes four comments, and clicks on eight ads.
  • More than 250 billion photos have been uploaded to Facebook. This equates to 350 million photos per day.
  • The average Facebook user has 130 friends.
  • You can’t block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook.
  • Several people have been murdered for unfriending someone on Facebook – yikes!
  • You can change your language on Facebook to many different things, including a humorous ‘pirate’ language.
  • There are around 30 million dead people on Facebook.
  • More than 600,000 hacking attempts are made to Facebook accounts every day.
  • The blue colour scheme choice is not random and there is a valid reason behind it. Mark Zuckerberg is colour-blind to red and green and therefore, blue is the richest colour for him. In an interview, he stated: “blue is the richest colour for me — I can see all of blue.”
  • American actor Al Pacino was the first face of Facebook. The Site displayed a header image featuring a man’s face obscured behind the binary code.
  • If Facebook were a country, it would be the fifth-largest country in the world, after China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia, just because of its users.
  • As far as Facebook goes, California is the most social state, with an amazing 15,267,160 users in the region.
  • Syria, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Iran have banned Facebook.
  • Iceland rewrote its constitution through Facebook as its citizens could engage in the process and put their views forward.
  • One of Facebook’s early add-ons was a peer-to-peer, or more technically friend-to-friend, file sharing service called Wirehog, developed alongside Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg and three others.