Facebook is closing in on 1B mobile active users. Here’s how they did it

Facebook has been pounding away at mobile, leaving no platform behind and rolling out updates fast and furious.

And here’s the payoff: One year after hitting the one billion users mark, the social network is creeping up on a mind-blowing milestone: one billion mobile users.

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Specifically, that’s monthly active users, or MAUs. In Facebook’s quarterly earnings report, we read that mobile MAUs were 874 million as of September 30, 2013, an increase of 45 percent from this time last year.

Here’s a chart representing MAUs in millions from Q2 2012 through Q3 2013:

That one billion mark doesn’t seem so far away, does it? Just 14 percent growth would get Facebook to 1 billion mobile MAUs.

Here’s how they did it:

1. Focus on feature phones: “Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected, and Facebook For Every Phone enables people around the globe to connect to the people and things they care about most, no matter what kind of mobile device they use.” — Facebooker Ryan Makavy
2. Focus on mobile-only users: “The big question for us is, which areas are growing the fastest? … Whatever the form factor is going forward, we’ll be able to deliver.” — Mark Zuckerberg
3. Focus on mobile web: “We’ve sent a team of people around the world to see what they use, and we care about everybody, not just tech geeks.” — Facebooker Peter Deng
4. Focus on global: “Today, only about a third of the world’s population is online. We are in a unique place to encourage broader use of the Internet. … We’re trying to make access to Facebook cheaper, and we feel … this can be applied to other services, too.” — Mark Zuckerberg
5. Focus on speed: “We [are] getting improvements out to people quickly while minimizing disruptions for users. Our 4-8 week release timelines feel like a good trade-off for now.” — Facebooker Christian Legnitto
6. Focus on innovation: “Instead of our phones being designed around apps … we can flip that around and design our phones around people first.” — Mark Zuckerberg

And all that mobile mayhem adds up to one gnarly bottom line: $880 million in mobile revenue for the past three months alone.