Facebook would consider Beijing office for local advertisers

Facebook said it may consider opening a sales office in China to provide more support to local advertisers who use the website to reach customers overseas.

While Vaughan Smith, Facebook's vice president of corporate development, told Reuters it was exploring ways to provide even more support locally, he did not comment on how soon it plans to be in China.

Facebook currently has a Hong Kong sales office with a staff of 30 to 40 people who deal with advertisers locally and in the Chinese mainland, where its services are inaccessible. The sales office would, for the first time, put Facebook employees inside the Chinese mainland.

Several Chinese companies, such as Tsingtao Beer, VANCL, an Internet fashion brand, and Povos, an electric appliance company based in Shanghai, have already started marketing their products to global customers through Facebook.

"The investment in brand promotion on social networking platforms has already exceeded those on search engines. For Chinese companies to enter global market, social networking websites have become increasingly important," the 21st Century Business Herald quoted Shan Liang, an executive director of Soci-Link, a company that helps promote Chinese brands on Facebook, as saying.

Bloomberg on Monday reported that Facebook could open an office in China within a year, citing a person familiar with the matter.

The world's largest social networking company is in talks to lease space in the Fortune Financial Center in Beijing's central business district, Bloomberg said.

The news came after Sina Corp's Weibo, a Chinese social networking service that works like Twitter, went public in the US last month.