The popularity of messaging service WhatsApp continues to grow at a rapid pace. The latest figures, announced by WhatsApp Inc. CEO Jan Koum in a Facebook post, saw one of the world’s most popular messaging services increase their monthly active users to 700 million.

These 700 million users are sending an astounding 30 billion messages a day, which amounts to four messages for every person in the world.

These latest figures make it one of the biggest social networks in the world, bigger than Twitter at 284 million, Instagram at 300 million and Messenger at 500 million. However, it does still lag far behind Facebook, which has 1.32 billion users at last count.

This increase is on track with the growth they have seen over the past year. In August WhatsApp had 600 million monthly active users.

Back in February, Facebook bought WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion, making it one of the largest acquisitions in the history of Silicon Valley.

Over the last year Facebook has been asking it’s investors to be patient regarding their latest acquisitions.

“Over a five-year time frame we have a number of services which we think are well on their way to reaching 1 billion people: WhatsApp, Instagram and search are a number of them. And once we get to that scale, then we think that they will start to become meaningful businesses in their own right,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Messaging apps have grown in popularity as smartphone adoption increases in developed countries, but especially in emerging markets like India, Indonesia, South Africa and China, who are expected to lead the smartphone growth for 2015.

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