Facebook claims 100 million active users in India

Facebook on Tuesday said it has reached a remarkable milestone by registering 100 million active users in India, which has made India as the country with the largest Facebook user base outside of the US.

The company also found that 84 per cent of Indian users accessed Facebook through their phones, but they used the Facebook mobile app on their handheld devices. Facebook now boasts 1.22 billion users around the world, and counts 183 million users in the US alone. The figures for US and India users together account for over 23 per cent of total Facebook usage worldwide. Further, the company was expected to continue its fast track growth on the Indian subcontinent.

Data over the past year had shown that India would overtake the US in terms of Facebook users within the next year or two. In November, social marketing and research firm Jana's CEO/co-founder Nathan Eagle anticipated that the majority of Facebook's revenue would come from India by 2015.

Business Line quoted Kevin D'souza, head of Growth and Mobile Partnerships, Facebook India, as saying that Facebook had only just begun and its mission was to give people the power to share, and make the world more open and connected. He added, Facebook 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 everyone.

Under the internet.org project, the company is partnering with handset makers, telecom operators and equipment vendors to drive connectivity, and at the centre of the India game plan is the 'mobile first' strategy that the company announced globally a year ago. The company now offers services in many regional languages.

The company launched a programme called ''Facebook for Every Phone'' app, which delivered smartphone-like Facebook experience on feature phones in Hindi and other Indian languages, including Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Bengali and Marathi.

According to the report, Vaughn Vaughan Smith, vice-president, Facebook, had told Business Line in an earlier interview that India was an exciting market for the company as it was the start of the data boom. The company had found that the primary reason for Indians to subscribe to data was to get on to Facebook, he added.