Facebook Hiring to Expand European Advertising Presence

Facebook reached nearly 100 million European users in September, its strongest month yet in the region. And the company is looking to expand its operations accordingly, especially at its Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. The focus appears to be on hiring people in a variety of sales and other business operation positions, presumably as a means to grow the company’s European advertising revenue.

Out of the 33 positions listed on the company’s Dublin job site, nearly half are directly related to sales and advertising. Most of the others are for back-end business operations, and for language-specific user services.

The company is also hiring 7 people — mostly ad jobs — in its London office, and one account executive position in Italy. Meanwhile, it appears to have snagged former Google and Last.fm regional head Scott Woods to run its push into the German advertising market.

Europe has a well-developed advertising market, and as Facebook is making this revenue stream its priority for the time being, the expansion is hardly surprising. The company could make more than $550 million in revenue for 2009, mostly from advertising. We don’t know what portion of that is already coming in from Europe, although the Dublin regional headquarters was only announced a year ago, so the effort is likely still getting off the ground. Assuming Facebook continues growing its user base in the region, look for this expansion to start paying off next year.

For some more context, here’s data I just pulled from our Global Monitor report last month, showing the ten largest countries on Facebook, along with their annual growth rates and growth numbers. For more, see our articles last week on which 10 European countries grew the fastest last month, including notable surges in Germany and Austria.