Facebook has 65 million active users in India

World's largest social network Facebook Thursday announced that it has over 65 million active users in India, an eight-fold increase over last two years.

"We are pleased to announced that over 65 million people in India are using Facebook to share and connect," said Kirthiga Reddy, director (online operations), Facebook India.

She told reporters that these were all monthly active users or people who use their accounts at least once a month.

Describing India as an important market for Facebook, Reddy pointed out that Facebook had just eight million users in India when they opened India office here in 2010.

With over one billion people connecting and sharing on Facebook platform, the social network has become the largest and the most engaged community of real people in the world.

Reddy said the social network was taking all steps to root out fake accounts with a global team constantly keeping a watch on people with fake identity and those hacking other accounts.

She said it was taking the issues of fake accounts and hacking seriously.

"Our goal is to make sure that every account is a real person.  We are constantly employing our algorithms to make sure that we are finding them (hackers and people with fake accounts) quickly and making sure they are not on the system," she said.

Facebook has a team across the globe for monitoring 24x7 and to make sure that people have great experience on the site. A major part of their efforts to check hacking is to educate users about the safety tips.

Facebook, which moved to a 66,000 square feet new office in Cyberabad here, would continue to develop innovative products and services specific to India for both desktop and mobile users.

Under Facebook for every phone launched last year, the social network is now available in nine different languages on phone and 10 languages, including Hindi, Telugu Marathi, Kannada and Gujarati, on desktops.

Reddy said advertisement was primary source of revenue for Facebook but declined to share the details of India's contribution to the global revenues and the headcount in India.

The company has less than 4,000 employees across the world.

She explained how the innovative ads and sponsored stories in news feeds for marketers were helping Facebook make the revenues. It also has entered into partnerships with Airtel and other telecom service providers.

Reddy cited the example of Mumbai-based retailer Chumbak.com, whose 25 percent online revenues ceme from Facebook.

"Chumbak has seen 5X RoI (return on investment) on its total advertising spend on Facebook, and 40 percent of its website traffic comes from Facebook," she said.