Facebook has updated their new statistics page and the most significant statistic is that sharing has increased 500 percent in only six months. The total number of users on the site has less than doubled in the same amount of time, growing from 250 million users to 400 million. That means the average user is sharing over 12 pieces of content each week.

As Kim-Mai Cutler points out, Facebook users don’t appear to be increasing their volume of status updates though:

Facebook users are also posting 60 million status updates a day or 50 percent more than they were in September. However, the overall percentage of Facebook’s user base posting status updates has actually fallen with 35 of the 400 million users publishing these per day. That’s unchanged from December, and only 5 million higher than the 30 million users posting status updates a day in July.

The picture is clear: Facebook users continue to be highly active (with 50 percent of users logging into the site daily) and are increasingly using the site as a tool for sharing stories with their friends. If you’ve been increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of content within your Facebook feed, it’s because users are now sharing more information on the site.

So how did Facebook increase their volume of sharing so dramatically? The most obvious explanation is an increased number of sites that have implemented Facebook Connect (over 80,000). Additionally, Facebook’s new share analytics tools have made it easier for website owners to enable users to share their content on Facebook.

Overall, Facebook continues to post remarkable growth while maintaining remarkable levels of user engagement.