Popular social network Facebook has the same number of male and female users in South Africa.

According to a report released by research firms World Wide Worx and Fuseware, 5.6 million males and 5.6 million females use the social network.

The research report titled "SA Social Media Landscape 2015" stated that the results underline the extent to which social media has become mainstream in the southern African country.

Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of World Wide Worx said in the statement the results are clear evidence of both the maturity and mainstream use of Facebook as an everyday tool rather than as a high-tech choice.

"From a marketer's point of view, an equally significant finding is that, of a total of 11.8-million South African users – 22% of the population – 8.8-million access it on their mobile phones. This means that targeting Facebook users is not a matter only of marketing on the Facebook web site its mobile properties are probably more important," said Goldstuck.

Mike Wronski, managing director at Fuseware said the Facebook user base is beginning to resemble the South African urban population.

Wronski told ITWeb Africa, "Facebook is the social network with the largest active user base that best represents the demographics of SA, and so is the one that has the most accurate reflection of our country’s gender split. Twitter is slightly more male biased, while Pinterest and Instagram are slightly more female biased."

Other notable findings from the report reveal that the biggest platform for Facebook from a phone operating system point of view is Android, growing from 1.26 million in 2013 to 3.2 million in 2014.

Windows Phone is beginning to emerge from below the radar, rising from 124,000 to 260,000. iOS remains in third place, though, remaining relatively stable at 580,000 users, the statement reads.

Meanwhile, BlackBerry fell from the top position to second dropping only marginally in user numbers, from 2.6 million to 2.4 million.

"More important than the operating system numbers, however, is the split between feature phones and smartphones," said Goldstuck.

"Five million Facebook users still use feature phones. While smartphones only just dominate at 5.6 million it is clear that a large Facebook user base is still on a basic device."

Since launching in 2004, Facebook has grown into the world's biggest social network with 1.23 billion monthly active users at the end of 2013.

In September the social network announced that had notched up 100 million monthly users in Africa.