The battle for the social networking realm went global today, as Facebook announced the first in a series of local language sites designed to attract users in non-English speaking countries.

From Monday, Facebook users in Latin America and Spain will be able to 'dar un toque' - send a 'poke' - and use all of the other features of the site in Spanish. Similar 'local' versions of Facebook in France and Germany will follow.

The move is significant because it shows the urgency with which English-based social networking sites are trying to expand their global footprint as markets in more established countries such as the UK begin to mature.

Experience suggests that once one player has gained a foothold in a country, it becomes extremely difficult for others to compete - as in the US, where Facebook has struggled to catch up with the more dominant MySpace, and in the UK.

Facebook said that more than 60 per cent of its users were outside the US, including more than 2.8 million in Latin America and Spain. To help translate the site, Facebook recruited locals, including one Spanish-speaker who wrote 3 per cent of the new site.

"Our goal has always been to allow people to use Facebook in their native language," Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, said.

Facebook will be aware that MySpace, which is already the larger site globally - with 78 million users as compared with Facebook's 38 million - has developed 13 foreign language sites, including Finnish, Norwegian, and Japanese.

MySpace, which is owned by News Corporation, parent company of Times Online, has employed local management teams to help tailor content in other countries, and plans to roll out soon in Russia, Poland, and Brasil.

The speed with which the race to win over the world's would-be social networkers has accelerated shows how important such sites have become. MySpace waited a little over two years before it released its first non-English language site - a French version - in August, 2006. It has taken Facebook - the younger of the two sites - just 16 months.

France, where social networking is not as popular as in the UK, has emerged as one of the most fiercely contested battle grounds. In December, 2.6 million people visited MySpace, which has a French version, whereas 1.9 million came to Facebook, according to Nielsen Online.

By comparison in Brasil, Orkut, which is owned by Google, is the runaway leader, with 15 million users - equivalent to 70 per cent of the population who use the internet at home. MySpace has only 781,000 Brasilian users, and Facebook 256,000.

The trend is not confined to networking sites. YouTube, the world's largest video-sharing site, has also rolled out in 12 languages across 19 countries, including, Polish, Japanese, and Russian. In the early days it faced competition from foreign language sites which focused on locally produced content, but now the Google-owned site tailors its home page to promote such content alongside English videos.

DailyMotion, a French-language video site, still competes strongly with YouTube, but the US site has pulled away from its competitor since launching a French version of its site in June last year.

The path to creating take a successful, foreign-language site is not always smooth, however. When EBay, the auction site, created a Chinese version of its site simply by translating the US one, local users complained that it wasn't Chinese enough.

The company subsequently partnered with a local firm which changed aspects of the way the site was laid out to appeal to Chinese sensibilities, and the result has been more successful.

Facebook's announcement comes as part of a more widespread growth spurt. The Silicon Valley-based firm revealed last week that it expects to more than double its number of employees - from 450 to 1,000 - this year. It is also advertising for a range of positions that indicate it intends to expand globally, including a UK-based director of international business development.

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