When Facebook opened their first office in India at Hyderabad in 2010, only 8 million Indians used Facebook. Now that figure has crossed 100 million users, making India the largest userbase for Facebook outside US.
About 180 million Americans are Facebook users, and it is being told that we will overtake that number within 2 years. As of December, 2013, Facebook had 1.23 billion users all over the world. Hence, India and USA combined accounts for 23% of all Facebook users!
This is certainly a huge achievement for Facebook, considering that it’s userbase is shrinking in the rest of the world as privacy issues and over-saturation of social media is being talked about. But Indians are in no way going away from Facebook as of now, as it’s growth trajectory has baffled even the hardcore marketer.
Interestingly, around 84% of these 100 million Indians access Facebook from mobile phones, a fact which will send tremors down the online marketing and social media marketing firms all over the world. Such huge gap between desktop and mobile access has never been observed before. This is a number far greater than Airtel and Tata Teleservices subscribers!
Javier Olivan, vice-president, growth & analytics, Facebook, said, “We crossed the landmark on March 31,”. As per Olivan, who is one of the three people in Facebook who directly reports to Mark Zuckerberg, their next target is 1 billion Indian users. “That (1 billion) is a different focus and challenge,” he says.
Facebook’s biggest challenge of going from 1 million to 10 million was the accessibility. When they removed the requirement of having an email id of an American college to be able to join Facebook, they removed this problem. For going from 10 million to 100 million, the main challenge was the platform and the product. They had to alter their user interface as more and more Indians were choosing mobile phones to access Facebook.
And now, the goal of moving from 100 million to 1 billion will have the greatest challenge of connectivity. In that sense, the acquisition of WhasApp was the right action for fulfilling this goal.
Kevin D’Souza, Head of Growth and Mobile Partnerships, Facebook India said, “We’ve only just begun. Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share, and make the world more open and connected. We recently announced internet.org, a global partnership with the goal of connecting the next 5 billion people around the world, to make the same access and opportunity available to every one.”
Facebook has recently announced partnerships with Airtel, Reliance, Idea , Aircel to let their subscribers use Facebook without any data charges.
And more such plans are in the offering right now. Facebook is certainly betting big on the huge Indian market to expand their presence and bottom-line.
[…] remains by far the most popular social network in India. In April 2014, Facebook crossed 100 million userbase mark in India and by end of the year, it will reach close to 109 […]