By SHUBHAJIT Chakraborty

Hyderabad, March 16 – Facebook will come to India soon. The world’s largest social networking site is planning to open an office in Hyderabad to back its rapidly growing global presence. This would be their first outside office other than US and Europe. Hyderabad is already a technology township, which host a number of renowned multinational organizations such as Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, Google and GE Capital.

The Facebook has over 400 million users worldwide, of India alone account a large chunk of people around 8 million. The social networking site is already been gained immense popularity among all the sections in Indian urban crowd.

Facebook plans to establish a world-class team of professionals that will support a growing number of advertisers and developers. The Hyderabad office would be their fourth support center in the world. The headquarters are located at Palo Alto in California and Dublin in Ireland.

“We are proud to call America’s Lone Star State and India’s City of Pearls home,” Don Faul, the company’s director of global online operations, wrote in his Facebook blog.

“Having multiple support centres in a variety of time zones provides Facebook users and advertisers around the world with round-the-clock, multilingual support,” the California-based company said in a statement.

“The new offices come at a significant time in our international growth. Seventy per cent of the people using Facebook are outside the US and are accessing the service from more than 70 languages,” Faul added.

“We are now hiring people to join the online sales and operations teams that we’re forming in these new locations,” Faul said. The job opportunities have been posted on the website www.facebook.com/careers. The process of recruitment has already begun.

Facebook was first founded by a Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and his couple of friends in 2004 and it was then only limited to college campus. However, soon it became a popular online destination of teenagers and adults and spread outside of high school and college students.