BANGALORE: With the world’s most popular “Social Media” tag on it, Facebook has kick started its self as a robust platform and has grown far and wide. With the Smartphone revolution kicking in, it has shown a constant growth in the usage with the social media users growing nearly 2 folds of 500 million active users on Facebook as on 2012, which has rose close to a billion now, reports Times of India

The driving factor for this growth would be the mobile internet, where the world is moving onto Smartphones leaving behind PCs, and Facebook wants to take the leverage over this to compete with Google’s success over the mobile phone platform.

# Reason behind Facebook’s acquisition of Whatsapp: Presently, the social networking giant is on a buying spree of acquiring popular companies to increase its user strength and making a strong future for the platform by having the popular and much needed apps on it. The possible reason for the Whatsapp acquisition was to get a hold on the fast growing mobile messaging forms and to eliminate competition.

Brian Taylor, digital MD at Jaywing believes that the acquisition of Whatsapp has given 2 main advantages for Facebook,

"It's removed a serious competitor threat," he explained. "Where Facebook owns 'capturing our moments', WhatsApp dominates one-on-one communication, particularly in emerging markets across Asia."

It's also about access to real-time data. "WhatsApp allows Facebook to see huge amounts of demographic and behavioral data as it happens," says Taylor.

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