Facebook mobile users break 300M mark

40% of Facebook's users do so on mobile, connecting the dots for sponsored stories in mobile feeds

There are a lot of you using Facebook on your mobile devices, according to the findings of Benedict Evans of Enders Analysis. And perhaps more significantly there are a lot more of you using Facebook on your mobile devices lately, over 50 million more in just the past few months.

The number of Facebook users accessing the site via their mobile devices -- across all operating systems, including iOS, Android, and less popular ones like BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows Phone -- has pushed into the range of 300 million. This accounts for about 40% of Facebook's 800 million active users.

Interestingly, earlier this month AppData, an app tracking company, determined that the Android mobile Facebook app has more daily users than iOS. And yet the iOS mobile app has more weekly and monthly users than Android.

This is a confusing stat to be sure, which perhaps indicates that Android users are more apt to log into Facebook every day, while iOS people Facebook get their business done during long weekend social networking sessions. Also interesting, Facebook had updated Android's app for Timeline compatibility before iOS.

The growing numbers of users logging on to Facebook via their mobile devices is reflected in another of the company's recent changes, the rumored upcoming addition of "sponsored stories" in mobile news feeds.

Sponsored stories are posts that speak positively about a given company or brand appearing in news feeds, which are gleaned from a given company's Facebook page by marketers and distributed on a large scale across Facebook. Currently, sponsored stories are used only on Web applications, as well as in the news ticker in the upper right hand corner of the page.

When rumors of the addition of sponsored stories to the mobile news feeds started circulating earlier this month, via a Bloomberg story, some were just tacking it up to yet another of Facebook's endless updates. Now in consideration of Facebook's growing numbers in mobile, it seems there was a method to the madness.