We are not a social media company now, we are mass media: Facebook India head

Nearly four years after Facebook launched its operations in India, the social networking company is aggressively pursuing plans to make money in this market.

With 93 million active users, India is already the second largest market in terms of user base.

The growth is being driven by the mobile platform, with 75 million users accessing Facebook on their phones. Business Line met Kirthiga Reddy, Head of Facebook’s India operations, to find out how the company plans to monetise this opportunity.

How has Facebook changed since it launched operations in India four years ago?

We have shifted from being a desktop company to being mobile first. In India, we have 31 million daily mobile users.

Over the last year, we have really reached tipping point, driven by our mobile first strategy. The other shift is on monetisation. When we started operations in India 3.5 years ago, people used to ask us whether someone really advertised on our platform. Now, marketers use Facebook as a strong platform. Globally, we believe we are one per cent done and in India we are getting started.

What’s driving the India monetisation strategy?

There are three broad areas we find resonating in India. The biggest driver is our reach, with 93 million active users, 75 million on mobile devices and 41 million returning to our platform every day.

We are not a social media company now, we are mass media. Our reach is seven times (greater) than the largest English daily; we are bigger than the largest radio channel. Within this our ability to do targeted advertising is driving huge value to brands. The third thing is our ability to invest in tools that show a return on investments to advertisers. We are able to prove RoI, brand matrix, awareness, and purchase intent. Today, digital advertising is a small part of the overall spends. But 18 months from now, it will be a completely different picture and Facebook will play a pivotal role in making that happen.

How is Facebook’s India organisation relevant to global operations?

In India, we have an operations office, which is only one of four operations offices across the globe. These four offices service 1.2 billion users, millions of advertisers and thousands of developers. India is also significant in terms of the size of the market. India is seen as the lead in our emerging markets focus. Last month, we had our emerging markets products team here and they met with marketers, developers, agencies and consumers to pick lessons from here for other markets.

What learnings have you picked from India?

There are a bunch of learnings around feature phone usage, language usage… Recent conversations with advertisers have been on reaching users in tier-2 and -3 markets.

With Facebook you can now deliver your message to feature phone users, which wasn’t possible before. We now support nine different languages. This helps marketers as most companies, like Coca-Cola and Maruti, are talking about reaching users in tier-2 and -3 markets.

There have been concerns about privacy. Also, some surveys recently showed Facebook will die over the next few years. Is this going to impact business?

People ask us about it but it has not come in the way of our business.

Has the recent decision by TRAI to cap advertisements on TV helped Facebook to shift advertisers on to the digital platform?

The shift is happening with or without TRAI. Brands are looking at mobile and digital because that’s where people are. The TRAI order will no doubt serve as a catalyst for this shift.

Do you have a separate strategy to grow revenue on mobiles and laptops/desktops?

If you have a Facebook strategy then you have a mobile strategy. There are certainly some product units that are available on desktops.

But if you look at our ad formats, it applies to mobile as well. It’s one strategy. In the sales team, there’s no separate mobile team. There are instances where a company had a new product launch and wanted to target males in the 18-24 year category and they wanted to reach them on mobiles.

On the other hand, Coca-Cola wanted to launch Coke Studio-3 and they did all the news-feed, including both mobiles and desktops.

They developed exclusive content that was first released on Facebook. They had phenomenal results. They reached 17 million users on day one.

How do you compete with Google and Twitter?

We are all growing the market. There are different ways we can enhance each other’s efforts and we are looking at where internet is now and where it needs to be, where media distribution is now and where it should be. We are working with each other on how we can drive the entire digital proposition.

There are a lot of strategic areas where we can work together at an industry level.

Where do you want to see Facebook in India in three years’ time?

We have lot of investments like internet.org, which is about connecting the next 5 billion. And that’s relevant in India.

From the monetisation point of view, our mission is to be the most effective platform for marketers.

I have been with the company for four years now and every day it feels like its getting started.

The biggest driver in India is our reach, with 93 million active users, 75 million on mobile devices and 41 million returning to our platform every day.