beyondbrics

Well that didn’t take long. Just over a month ago when Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook, “vacationed” in China there was much speculation about whether he had business motives too.

Now the world’s largest social network has announced it is opening a sales office in Hong Kong. The territory is a big internet market on its own, and while China’s censors make it hard to access Facebook on the mainland, being in Hong Kong gives the company ready access to the 1bn-strong market if that ever changes.

In a statement on Tuesday, Facebook announced that it will open an ad sales office for support and sales in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Blake Chandlee,VP & Commercial Director, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Emerging Markets for Facebook said:

With millions of people in Hong Kong and Taiwan using Facebook daily to connect with the people, brands, and causes they care about, Facebook provides a powerful combination of reach and engagement for advertisers … By continuing to build our presence in the region, Facebook will be able to directly provide full support to advertisers here and help them create and execute campaigns that will have a meaningful impact on their businesses.

In spite of the official mainland block on Facebook – which means that users can only access the site through a proxy internet portal registered outside of the mainland – the networking site still has a small and growing community. According to statistics from SocialBakers, a website that follows web traffic, the number of Facebook users has jumped to 700,000 from 300,000 over the past two months since Zuckerberg’s visit to China (it’s not entirely clear if the site works with Facebook or independently, so take these numbers with a grain of salt).

Last June, Zuckerberg told the Cannes Lions advertising festival that his company was planning to change its approach to expanding abroad to do “specific things in specific countries”, beyondbrics reported. He highlighted his interest in China, Japan and Russia, some of the last countries in the world where Facebook has comparatively small reach.

Facebook, which has over 500m users, said it already works with 3 Hong Kong, the mobile subsidiary of Hutchison Telecom, and will build up local expertise for brands to launch marketing campaigns through Facebook.

In China 100m people are already using microblogging sites such as Sina Weibao to communicate and socialise online.

The question is which Asian country Zuckerberg will choose for his next vacation.