【英语科技】Facebook：下一步进军中俄日韩

Facebook is looking to China, Russia and Japan for its next phase of expansion as its overall growth has begun to taper.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of the world’s largest social network, said that with almost 500m members, Facebook was finding it impossible to maintain its breakneck growth.

“We saw our exponential growth rate continue for a very long period of time, and it still does at a super-linear rate, though not quite 3 per cent a week any more,” Mr Zuckerberg said in an interview with the Inside Facebook blog.

Mr Zuckerberg told an audience of marketers at the Cannes Lions advertising festival on Wednesday that after relying largely on organic growth, Facebook would soon begin to make its first strategic local moves.

“We are down to four countries that we are not the leading social network in,” he said, naming Japan, Russia, China and South Korea.

“Now for the first time we are focused on doing some specific things in specific countries.”

He did not specify whether that would involve local customisation of Facebook in those countries, or some sort of corporate activity.

“I think if we succeed, we have a good chance of being the company that brings [social networking] to 1bn people,” he said during an onstage interview.

Facebook faces large, established competitors, including Japan’s Mixi, Tencent QQ in China and Vkontakte of Russia.

In other markets, Facebook’s user base far outstrips past leaders in social media such as Bebo and MySpace.

Non-English languages, in particular French, Spanish, Turkish and Indonesian, are growing quickly on Facebook, according to the Inside Network.

Facebook had been used in broadly the same way all over the world, Mr Zuckerberg said at Cannes, reflecting the “core need” at the heart of the service for people to share things and be part of a community.

“That is really similar across every country,” he said, although advertising and applications developed for the platform were more varied.

Mobile internet would be a driver of growth in social media, Mr Zuckerberg said.

“We are getting our first crop of countries now that have more mobile usage than web usage,” he said, citing India. “I think most people think it’s only a matter of time before that starts happening more universally.”

随着整体用户数量增长开始放缓，Facebook在制定下一步扩张战略时，正把目标瞄向中国、俄罗斯和日本。

这家全球最大社交网络的创立者兼首席执行官马克?扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)表示，在拥有近5亿用户之后，Facebook不可能继续保持超高速的增长。

“我们的用户数量指数级增长已经很长一段时间了，现在增速仍然很快，但不再每周都能增长3%了，” 扎克伯格在接受Inside Facebook博客采访时表示。

扎克伯格周三在戛纳国际广告节(Cannes Lions advertising festival)上向营销人员表示，此前Facebook基本上依靠有机增长，但将很快启动首次战略性地区行动。

他说：“我们将目标锁定在四个国家，在那里我们还不是领先的社交网络。”他表示，这四个国家是日本、俄罗斯、中国和韩国。

“这是我们第一次致力于针对特定国家采取特别行动。”

他没有说明Facebook是否会在上述国家进行本土化，或是否会进行一些企业行为。

“我想如果我们成功，那么Facebook将很有可能成为一家将（社交网络）带给10亿用户的公司。” 扎克伯格在台上接受采访时表示。

Facebook将面临强大而成熟的竞争对手，其中包括日本的Mixi、中国的腾讯QQ，以及俄罗斯的Vkontakte。

在其它市场，Facebook的用户基数都远远超过了Bebo、MySpace等早期社交媒体领袖。

市场研究公司Inside Network的报告显示，Facebook的非英语用户，特别是法语、西班牙语、土耳其语以及印尼语的用户数量正在迅速攀升。

扎克伯格在戛纳表示，全球用户使用Facebook的方式大致相同，这反映了人们对此项服务的“核心需求”，即与人分享信息和成为某个社区的一员。

“这点在每个国家都很相似，”他说，尽管不同地区之间的广告和专为平台开发的应用程序差别很大。

扎克伯格还表示，对于社交媒体来说，移动互联网将成为增长的驱动力量。

“我们看见在一些国家，通过手机对社交网站的访问量已经超过了对正常网页的访问量，”他说，并表示印度就是如此。“我想大多数人认为，这变成一种普遍现象只是时间问题。”