Facebook celebrates "Friendship Day"

Mark Zuckerberg declared Thursday the second annual Friendship day, writing in a post on his page last month that it's important to recognize the growth of Facebook's community. The site had about 1.5 billion monthly active users as of Dec. 31.

"On February 4, I hope you'll join me in celebrating #friendsday -- a moment to celebrate the friendships that have made a difference in your life," the 31-year-old billionaire wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

“If you have a story about friendship, I’d love to hear it. Please share and I’ll read as many of them as I can!,” he added.

According to Zuckerberg, the acts of friendship, love and kindness we all share on Facebook are changing the world every day in ways we can’t fully measure.

It has 1.04 billion daily active users (DAUs) while mobile DAUs were 934 million on average for December 2015.

Over 80 million people use Facebook Lite for slow connections, up from 50 million. Nearly 500 million users are on Events, up from 450 million in July last year.

The social networking giant has 2.5 million advertisers and 50 million small businesses on Pages -- up from 45 million last quarter.

Facebook's gross revenue in the year 2015 stood at $17.93 billion, an increase of 44 percent year-over-year.

"(The year) 2015 was a great year for Facebook. Our community continued to grow and our business is thriving," Zuckerberg said.