DBS Internet Marketing’s Social Media expert, James Hopkins, was interviewed by Peter Levy on The Peter Levy Show this afternoon as part of an item about Facebook. The premise of the interview was that people are leaving Facebook in “droves”, partly caused by privacy issues. Speaking after the interview, James said: “Peter Levy argued that around 600,000 less people used Facebook in the UK in December than previously, but that is a very small number when you consider that around 33million people in the UK use Facebook – approximately 52% of the population. As Facebook was only launched in 2004, and was only opened to the general UK public to use in 2006, it is phenomenal to think that over half the UK population has started using this site in 6 years. “The UK has the second highest Facebook usage in the world in terms of percentage of the population, beaten only by the USA. Facebook has 1 billion users worldwide, which it has gained in 8 years. It has grown at a phenomenal rate, and it stands to reason that it cannot keep growing at that rate forever. “Saying that, we are seeing businesses coming to us in droves wanting to have company pages on Facebook. Facebook is always evolving, and whereas it started being a site for college students only, businesses are now finding they need to have a presence on Facebook. This might help explain the drop in usage over the Christmas period”. James argued that Facebook’s privacy settings allowed users to choose exactly what other people could and couldn’t see on their Facebook profile. Peter Levy also discussed the “graph search” which Facebook launched yesterday, which we will blog about in a separate, indepth post. UPDATED 17:48 Click HERE to listen to the interview