Facebook banking on India on rising smartphone sales

Social networking company Facebook is hugely cashing in on the Indian market due to its huge potential on the back of surging smartphones sales.

Meanwhile, the company has come out with a new advertising strategy that enables Facebook users in India to request cricket scores, celebrity updates or music by placing a "missed call" and receiving a recorded call or text message back.

India is the company's second-largest market after the US and it has 100 mn users in India with 84 mn using the social networking service through their mobile devices.

The company is targeting to get to its next milestone of adding another billion users from the country on its platform. "Mobile's exploding, and it's exploding here," Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer said. The company has around 1.28 bn users globally.

The advertising program is Facebook's first foray into new ad formats customized especially for the emerging countries.

"There's an opportunity for us to get much more localized with what we're building and developing," Kelly MacLean, Facebook's business lead for emerging markets, said.

Earlier, Facebook’s ads were usually modified versions of what the company was doing in developed countries.

“We are working with Facebook to explore new ad solutions which are directly built from the way people communicate on mobile everyday," Cheuk Chiang, the Asia Pacific chief executive officer at ad giant Omnicom Group, said.