Facebook eyes more likes from Bharat to expand user base

Focus to be more on tier-II, tier-III town and rural areas in the company's second-biggest market

Hoping to tap the next wave of 300 million internet users, social media giant Facebook on Thursday said that it planned to make deeper inroads into India. The company will concentrate more on tier-II, tier-III, rural areas and places where second-generation (2G) phones and feature phones are more prevalent. The company said India was its second largest market after United States and could soon be its biggest market.

Adam Mosseri

“We care so much about India because it is an important market, and growing at such a fast pace. It is also different from all the markets I have focused on. Networks, language and content fragmentation, are all very different,” said Vice-President Product Management Adam Mosseri. “In some ways, we are focused more on rural areas.”

 

The company is doing extensive research and making its products more data-lite, so that it can work on slower connectivity. Other than working on 2G, a host of teams are doing research in rural areas are asking people about their experiences. 

“A lot of work on performance is focused outside the main cities and on 2G and feature phones. If you go to the rural part of the country, there would be a lot of economically priced feature phones. FB Lite, performance, reducing the app footprint are all part of that. If one can make the experience on 2G or a feature phone better on a network that is intermittent and slow, it would definitely work well in metropolitan cities,” Mosseri added.

Around 65 per cent of Facebook users in India are on 2G network. The company said  there was focus on performance and making its interface faster, so that it could be most effective in creating more value for people. Facebook has 155 million users in India. The firm, which is making products for India, would also launch these in other countries. Over the past year, it has increased its focus and energy on India. 

“So, as we focus on trying to create more value for the next 300 million users who would come online in India. Some of them things are performance work, new newsfeed architecture and some of the product oriented things are offline video consumption. We are also looking at better connecting people to content they find interesting,” added Mosseri.  

India is growing faster than the rest of the world in a lot of ways. While worldwide, the company is growing by 15-16 per cent year-on-year, in India by 22 per cent. The company has dedicated a bunch of its workforce on coming up with India-specific.

The company is also trying to figure out how it can start Facebook in more India languages. At present its supports 12 regional languages. 

Among the features of the new architecture will be in ‘news feed’ on Facebook would be client side ranking, getting stories throughout the day, showing new and unseen stories and inserting new loaded stories into people's feeds while they scroll.

“Facebook has tested these features globally but the user engagement is the highest in India as it addresses specific Indian needs such as low connectivity,” Mosseri said.

Facebook Facts

• In India, there are 155 mn monthly active users (MAU) , 77 mn daily active user (DAU), 147 mn mobile MAU and 73 mn mobile DAU (as of Q2 2016)
• Facebook is available in 12 Indian languages (22 official languages in India, and  dialects) 
• As of the end of Q2 2016, daily actives on Facebook in India had grown 22% year over year, compared to a 17% increase in daily actives on Facebook worldwide
• Not including Likes, more than 50% of the reactions used in India are Love, and more than 30% of reactions used in India are Haha