

Ask HN: How does Facebook acquire new users overseas? - 101north

Especially wondering in how they drove up the massive growth in Brazil and India.
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mailarchis
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.

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tokenadult
Many people have international networks of friends and relatives. My Facebook
friends include people in Taiwan (both relatives and friends, some of whom I
see in person once in a while through international travel), Singapore
(Americans doing business there, whom I met elsewhere), Australia (friends
from email lists), Canada (met as I met the Australians), and Japan (Americans
living overseas whom I met on email lists). Friends tell other friends, and
the network grows. As the previous reply points out, Facebook is advertised in
many contexts by businesses, all around the world. All of these channels bring
new users to the network.

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danoc
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.

