Facebook looks East for the billion user mark

Facebook, the social network heavyweight, has made Japan, Russia, China and South Korea its target for doubling the number of users from the current 500 million to 1 billion.

Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is looking at eastern markets for expanding the world's largest networking site, where people of this region have yet to look at Facebook as a worthy competitor to local networking sites.

Speaking at the annual Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in France yesterday, Zuckerberg said that he aims to target four countries - China, Japan, Russia and South Korea - since Facebook is not the leader in social-networking in these countries.

"We are down to four countries that we are not the leading social network in. Now, for the first time, we are focused on doing some specific things in specific countries," Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg believes that by expanding in the four eastern countries, Facebook will become the first social networking site to have billion users worldwide, although he is keeping an eagle on Twitter, which is also expanding at a phenomenal pace and given time, may overtake Facebook.

But, Facebook faces competition from local social networking sites like Tencent QQ in China, Mixi in Japan, Vkontakte in Russia and Hangul in South Korea.

In order to drive growth in social media, mobile internet must be pushed, and citing India as an example, Zuckerberg said, "We are getting our first crop of countries now that have more mobile usage than web usage. I think most people think it's only a matter of time before that starts happening more universally."