Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of the world’s largest social network, said that after relying largely on organic growth to reach almost 500m members, Facebook would soon begin to make its first strategic local moves.
“We are down to four countries that we are not the leading social network in,” he told an audience of marketers at the Cannes Lions advertising festival, naming Japan, Russia, China and South Korea. “Now for the first time we are focused on doing some specific things in specific countries.”
He did not specify whether that would involve local customisation to Facebook in those countries, or some sort of corporate activity.
“I think if we succeed, we have a good chance of the being the company that brings [social networking] to 1bn people,” he said during an on-stage interview. “But it’s not a lay-up. It’s almost guaranteed that it happens [to someone] but it will be interesting to see how it plays out.”
Facebook faces large, established competitors in Asian markets, including Japan’s Mixi, Tencent QQ in China and Vkontakte of Russia. In other markets, Facebook’s userbase far outstrips past leaders in social media such as Bebo and MySpace.
Facebook has been used in broadly the same way all over the world up to now, Mr Zuckerberg said, reflecting the “core need” at the heart of the service for people to share things and be part of a community.
“That is really similar across every country,” he said, although advertising and applications developed for the platform were more varied internationally.
Mobile internet would be a big driver of global growth in social media, Mr Zuckerberg said.
“We are getting our first crop of countries now that have more mobile usage than web usage,” he said, citing India as an example. “I think most people think it’s only a matter of time before that starts happening more universally.”
But Mr Zuckerberg bemoaned the fragmentation in mobile platforms, where Apple, BlackBerry, Google and Nokia compete for customers’ and developers’ affections.
He said that Facebook would build “people-centric applications everywhere”, spanning websites, mobiles and applications. The company was “pretty close” to releasing a new mobile service, rumoured to be called Places, which would add location data to the platform, he added.
Facebook’s universal appeal underlined a wider trend towards greater personalisation, Mr Zuckerberg said, which was already encompassing video games and would soon revolutionise “every industry”. But in spite of its reach and ambition, Facebook’s ability to generate revenues from advertising to its members still lags more established western rivals such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Mr Zuckerberg said that Facebook was “out of the experimentation phase” in advertising and was now growing revenues quickly without having to “push a lot of the growth ourselves”.
But he said Facebook was in “no rush” to list on the stock market, because being a public company would make it harder to maintain a long-term perspective on how technology and the internet was changing.
“If we are able to build products that attract hundreds of millions of users and millions of marketers and developers, we are going to have a great business,” he said. “I don’t know exactly how big it’s going to be, but it’s going to be good.”
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