The popular instant messaging application, Facebook Messenger now has one billion monthly users globally, making it a platform that connects friends, families and loved ones around the world.

 This information was released by Press and Public Relations, Red Media Africa.

 The Red Media Africa is a Lagos based PR and empowerment marketing company, which focuses on using inspiration, empowerment and action to help brands and organisations connect with audience.

 It said that its new achieved milestone studies showed that apart from the newly achieved milestone of one billion monthly users, ``Messenger is the second most popular IOS app of all times, behind Facebook’’.

 It said that more than one billion messages were sent between people and businesses each month ``and the number has more than doubled in the past year’’.
“As part of this journey to one billion, we focused on creating the best possible experiences in modern day communications,” said the statement quoted David Marcus, Facebook Vice President as saying.

 “We remain focused on helping connect people to the people and businesses who matter most,” Marcus said.
He said that studies also showed that people send more than 17 billion photos to friends through Messenger every month.

 Marcus added that on the average, more than 22 million Graphic Interchange Formats (GIFs) are sent every day via Messenger - ``that is 254 GIF's per second’’.

 ``There are more than 250 sticker packs available in messenger with more than 4,000 stickers.
``Messenger has been downloaded more than one billion times on Android, and people on Messenger have played 1.2 billion games of basketball.

 The  Facebook was founded in 2004, to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.
Facebook has 1.04 billion daily active users on average worldwide and 7.2 million daily visitors from Nigeria.