Updated:
We spoke to Elizabeth Linder (International Communications and Public Policy)for Facebook and got the following responses from her on the questions:
Q . What is the latest statistics for Facebook usage by brands and corporates in India? (both ads and fan pages) ? How many Indian brands or companies are there on Facebook?
We do not have specific statistics to share, but broadly speaking more than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook. We offer a number of opportunities for advertisers to reach new audiences and engage with clients on Facebook, and we’re pleased to see that clients both large and small have seen positive results from their Facebook campaigns. To cite an example, Nokia has made social media a cornerstone of its marketing strategy for its E-series and N-series premium devices with accounts on Facebook to promote its device and branded Facebook Pages for people to comment on. We have tens of thousands of advertisers currently running ads on Facebook, from local businesses to Fortune 500 companies. By providing businesses with unique targeting abilities, we have helped them engage in conversations with their consumers all across Facebook.
Q) How are Facebook fan page or brand issues managed or tackled by Facebook specifically for India? Is there any plan to have a Facebook India team in the future for helping brands with their presence on Facebook? If yes by when?
We have robust resources online to help advertisers develop effective Pages (http://www.facebook.com/FacebookAds), and advertising campaigns (http://www.facebook.com/advertising/) on Facebook.
We are committed to scaling our sales support teams globally as our advertiser and user base grows. India specifically is an important market for us from this perspective, but we have nothing specific to announce at this time.
Q) Does Facebook certify if the brand pages are created by users of companies and if any abuse is being done of the same Facebook Pages are a specialized type of Facebook profile created for a local business, brand, product, non-profit organization, celebrity figure, or other entity.
We have a team at Facebook that helps to verify the authenticity of Pages on the site. If an official representative or user identifies a fake, spam or abusive Page, we will investigate the reported content.
Please Note: She did not comment on when they plan to have an India office.
Earlier Post: You know a web service is popular in a certain geographical location when there are users of the service wanting a physical presence of the web service in their country. Such is the case of Facebook in India. Facebook did over 5 million users in December 2009 but is yet to see an official office in India. We spoke to their PR firm and were informed that Facebook has no physical presence in India.
Now we got a mail from Star News today informing us on how difficult it was for them to reach to facebook with regards to one of their fan pages.
Here is what Ramakrishnan Laxman- Head of Digital Business at Star News had to say “Facebook has arbitrarily blocked our popular Facebook fan page facebook.com/saasbahuaursaazish and also disabled our vanity url. This happened immediately after our page touched 10,000 fans (March 2). While we have responded to facebook and asked for reasons for the same, they have not responded to us.
It has been more than a week and this attitude from Facebook seems to be extremely high handed. While leading Media companies like us have contributed to the growth of Facebook in India, it is unfortunate that they dont give any importance to the Indian market.”
The above isn’t an isolated incident. Ive seen and heard about many companies both small and large facing issues of duplicate brand pages, spam and other issues. Given the fact that facebook has over 5 million users a month and several 1000′s of brands from India its sad that they have still not set up their office here. Linkedin which has far lesser number of users from India has already launched its presence in the country. Infact zynga the company which makes facebook social games is also entering the country.
I believe inorder to grow these global networks would need to provide customer support especially to brands and corporates which tomorrow would be advertisers on the platform. What’s your take on this issue? Is facebook under valuing the India opportunity?
PS: We have sent our questions to facebook and hope to receive their reply by tomorrow. Shall update this post with their replies soon.
Putting up an Office on India can be a good move for Facebook. I wonder, how will it affect Facebook’s Status on the economy of the said country?
Google launched India with a 60CR revenue when they entered India but their support teams where absolutely fantabulous. So I guess there might be some benchmark for them to launch in India but I have heard whispers about they looking out for a CEO in India.
With an estimtaed user base of more than 9 million its imperative for facebook to enter and set up office in the second most populous country of the world.
5 Million is too little compared to the world where it has 300 million active montly users.
I think the revenues for FB are also not much so it might not make sense to have an office in India at all.
Makes sense with Linked in cosidering almost anyone in IT uses it for job hunting and Zynga is probably looking to tap the developers in India
To play Devil’s Advocate here…
I’m not sure why FB needs an office in India. For this specific issue, fan pages require authentication, and the administrator of their page would have received due notification as he crossed the 10,000 user point. It is very easy to authenticate your page before your page is frozen (requires a corp email address or placing a Badge on your website. Office, or no office, Star’s admin should have been on top of this before it was an issue.
As for the office debate, it seems that one of the benefits of running on online business is that you can keep you overhead low by using the internet to conduct business globally from a central location. Yes, perhaps Facebook should hire more individuals in their team to address these customer service issues. But, even if a local office existed, my experience with FB tells me that you would still probably have to interact with them via email.
That said, Facebook already has a sales presence through partners in India, who are able to re-sell & offer customer support on their advertising. Many advertisers are buying their ads this way, and receiving good customer service.
I can understand their slowness in opening a full fledged office. Current CPC rates are significantly lower here than in the EU. I imagine they are growing their organization in EU first, then expanding to India. If I were running their business, this would be my approach too. After all, even when you are a MASSIVE business you still have to grow in a fiscally responsible way.
It is interesting that Star News is complaining about its social media presence disappearing since its methods seem dubious.
If you check their facebook page
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Saas-Bahu-aur-Saazis
Its obvious that the engagement is happening through only a few people who or obviously company employees or hired for posting (they have either joined only this page or love ‘star news’ so much that they have changed their profile image)
Its sad when media companies resort to such tactics.Perhaps its time that platforms like Watblog highlighted such dubious tactics-this is what hurts the medium.
As far as my knowledge is concerned, India is a R&D hub of lot many international organizations.
Let me talk about FB, which is completely dependent on creativity and applications development.Why should not they establish their office here? They heave to do this, I think they should have invested far more than now. As you have shared incident of Star news Ravi, that is not done to make business successful. if Facebook continues to avoid such big clients they will fetch negative marketing which can be proven baleful to them.