Facebook is beyond popular in Latin America.

Latin Americans are very fond of using social media as a doorway into the Internet at large. In fact, as Latin Post reported recently, social media ranks a close second to basic services like email and downloading in a ranking of habits of the region's users. Approximately 91 percent of the online broadband community in Latin America use social media.

According to a newly released eMarketer report, it looks like Facebook is the destination of habit for the vast majority of those millions of people. The analytics company released a report Wednesday titled "Latin America Loves Facebook," a claim that the company's data backs up.

The report investigated data traffic in the region, looking at Internet users who accessed their Facebook accounts at least once per month across all devices. The world's largest social media company has hundreds of millions of users across Latin America's largest countries.

In 2015 in Brazil, for example, the report found 79 million Facebook users, which accounted for about 70 percent of the country's Internet user base. About 70 percent of Internet users in Mexico used Facebook as well, accounting for 45.5 million people in the less populous country. The well-connected Argentina took the prize for the highest percentage of Facebook users per population in general, with over 45 percent of all Argentinians logging in on a monthly basis.

Overall, Latin America had an estimated 217.5 million Facebook users in 2015, and that number -- along with Facebook's market penetration -- is only expected to climb over the next few years, according to eMarketer's analytics.

In the next year, Facebook is expected to expand its active monthly user base in Latin America to about 240 million. Following that trend, Facebook could count more than 280 million users in Latin America by the end of the decade, signing on 44 percent of the region's entire population.

Those are just projections, however, and rival social networks do have a presence in social media-crazy Latin America as well.

Surprisingly, according to comScore data (excluding mobile access), Twitter isn't Facebook's biggest rival in the region. After Facebook, which had 140 million unique visitors in December, Blogger ranked second. Though Blogger is hardly considered a social network in the U.S., in Latin America it attracts over 60 million users each month.

LinkedIn, the social network aimed at professionals, had the third largest social media presence in Latin America in 2015 with 22.8 million unique visitors in December. Twitter came in fourth with a little over 18 million users.

As Latin Post reported recently, Facebook may not be a favorite with some Latin American governments, but with the everyday Latin American netizen, it's No. 1.

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