Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Facebook, a popular social networking site, believes that India is going to emerge as a major market for them where mobile is concerned. Though the current statistics are nothing compared to the net traffic generated by Facebook, the company believes that the Indian market has a lot of potential.

For the month of September, Facebook in India recorded 8.63 mn page views but Facebook mobile recorded only 35,900. This indicates that Facebook usage on mobile is yet to pick up in India and engagement levels are very small. The company believes that Facebook would be able to get 10 to 20 mn users on mobile in short term.

are seeing a growth of 15 to 30% in India on mobile. Going forward, we believe that India will be one of the largest markets for us. We have now started seeing a lot of intra-India traffic, which is a good sign,” says Henri Moissinac, director of mobile, Facebook. The company is in talks with a number of operators in the country for customisation of the mobile sites as well as joint marketing or coming up with products specific for their subscribers. Twitter has already tied up with Bharti Airtel and other such tie-ups might be in the offing.

Mobile segment, the US, UK and Canada are the three biggest markets, followed by Indonesia. Henri believes that India will emerge in a similar manner like Indonesia. “Indonesia went from nowhere to being the fourth largest country for us where mobile is concerned. We think it is going to be the same in India as well. In emerging markets, a substantial percentage of the population is accessing our site from both the web as well as mobile. In India, South Africa and Kenya, 60% of our users are both web and mobile,” says Henri. Most of the users first access Facebook on the web and then quickly move to mobile. 3G along with the operators' zeal to increase their revenue from data services is likely to emerge as a big growth driver for the company in the country.

Facebook's penetration depends on a number of factors, like the data plans being offered by the operators in that particular country, easy connectivity, handsets being used by the mobile users. The company might have to reposition its offerings to cater to the Indian market which is slightly different. Besides, a number of customers might end up accessing Facebook first time on mobile instead of on web. So simplification of the features to cater to the mass market would be the done thing.

“There are two ways of looking at it. One is that you have the same product but do them slightly differently for the Indian market. We would need a slightly different suite of products than the ones we have for iPhones. We have been told to simplify the Facebook experience for the Indian consumer. We might have to do similar things on mobile as well. As of now, the mobile site will also be available in some of the Indian languages besides Hindi and English but this is not true for downloadable applications,” explains Henri.

The mobile strategy is based on not just replicating the core features of the web version but to also come out with mobile specific features. For instance, it would be easier to upload pictures on the mobile than on the web version since on mobile you can click the picture and upload it almost immediately, which is not the case on web. The social networking site would be focusing on the address book and location-based applications for the mobile users. It has already come out with a Address Book product integrated with iPhone.