Los Angeles — Digital marketing vets nowadays have an amorous eye for Facebook. In an attempt to make its foothold stronger, the social media powerhouse has achieved a major success in the fight for top talent by recruiting Google’s top executive in Latin America, “Alexandre Hohagen,” who helped establish Google’s presence in Latin America, to be its vice president for sales in the region, as it continues its march into major international markets.
Facebook is taking aim at one of the only regions where Google’s Orkut is competitive: Latin America. The social media giant last week quietly issued a press release in Hohagen’s native country of Brazil, and the New York Times wrote the first English language story about it today.
Hohagen (pictured below) commenced working on Tuesday in the South American country, where he will be charged with expanding Facebook’s Brazilian audience while cutting into the regionally popular social site Orkut’s share. The latest comScore data shows Facebook has 12.4 million Brazilian users to Orkut’s 32.7 million.
“Millions of people in Latin America are using Facebook daily to connect and share with their friends and families, which is an integral part of the Latin American culture,” Hohagen said in a prepared release. “Facebook’s sales team for Latin America will be able to help companies here navigate this unprecedented reach and engagement to create campaigns that will impact their businesses in meaningful ways.”
Brazil has plenty of significance in the battle between Google and Facebook. It is one of the few vast markets where Google’s social network, Orkut, is still popular than Facebook’s.
Hohagen had assisted to establish Google’s Latin American presence during the past six years, and has served as a general manager in Brazil before being promoted as the head of the search engine’s entire operation in Latin America.
Facebook has been expanding aggressively overseas. It overtook Google in India last summer. Those were the only two markets that Orkut ruled since Google launched the service in 2004. Facebook is growing at a good clip in Brazil but still trails Orkut there. (Facebook is still struggling in other countries, like Japan, but its rivals there, and in other countries, are home-grown.)
Facebook said the appointment of Hohagen underscored its commitment to the region and said it planned to build a local advertising team there. Notably, a local media report states that Hohagen will be based out of a new office Facebook is opening in Brazil, where Orkut is still the dominant social network.
In a recent interview, David Fischer, vice president of advertising and global operations, stated that all the fresh recruitment was part of an international expansion to reach markets and marketers everywhere.
“We are expanding globally,” Fischer said, noting that 70% of Facebook users hail from outside the United States.
Meanwhile, when it comes to personnel battles in the past two years, Facebook has been getting the best of online rivals like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Facebook is making major moves in advertising, last week, the social media monopolist Facebook recruited Microsoft global advertising exec Carolyn Everson, after an eight-month stint with the 35-year-old technology giant. She is now Facebook’s VP of global sales.
“Carolyn will take us to the next level,” Fischer said. “She has great experience working with the top brands in the world.”