Ask HN: How does Facebook acquire new users overseas?
Especially wondering in how they drove up the massive growth in Brazil and India.
2 comments
I'm from India. I signed up on Facebook in the year 2007 when I traveled to US and made acquaintance with people from abroad and wanted to stay in touch with them.
Between 2007-2009 I used Facebook mostly to stay in contact with friends who lived abroad. But slowly steadily the number of my friends who were signing up for the same reason was growing. BY 2010, I started seeing huge migration of people from orkut (the predominant social network in india) to facebook. Proabbly because enought people had moved to FB
Now a days, Facebook has already become a mainstream phenomenon. Telephone carriers, mobile phone manufacturers indirectly provide free advertisement for Facebook/Twitter by talking about their social features. Also, I keep seeing google ads of Facebook whenever i search for something that looks like a proper noun/ a name.
Between 2007-2009 I used Facebook mostly to stay in contact with friends who lived abroad. But slowly steadily the number of my friends who were signing up for the same reason was growing. BY 2010, I started seeing huge migration of people from orkut (the predominant social network in india) to facebook. Proabbly because enought people had moved to FB
Now a days, Facebook has already become a mainstream phenomenon. Telephone carriers, mobile phone manufacturers indirectly provide free advertisement for Facebook/Twitter by talking about their social features. Also, I keep seeing google ads of Facebook whenever i search for something that looks like a proper noun/ a name.
I don't know about India, but Brazilians have a large online presence and love things that are popular in the US. Just take a look at the trending topics on Twitter and you'll almost always find something in Portuguese. I think that Facebook's worldwide dominance is what caused many to switch.