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Asia and Middle East Twitter

Twitter invests heavily in Asia and Middle east expansion

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By Tony Connelly, Sports Marketing Reporter

August 18, 2015 | 2 min read

Outside of Japan Twitter has largely struggled to break the Asian market, both in terms of building large userbases and growing its revenue

The social network is to focus heavily in Asia and the Middle East through a number of partnerships with key media companies which it hopes will use the platform to distribute their content.

After gaining 14 million new users in the second qaurter Twitter is aiming to turn around recent troubles and replicate Facebook’s success in the regions.

The company said it would work with key publishers to convince them to use the service, Vine and Periscope to distribute their news and media content to their audiences.

Overseeing the new focus will be Twitter’s, Rishi Jaitly, who has been appointed the new vice president of media for Asia Pacific and Middle East. Former head of public-private partnerships for Google, Jaitly was previously market director for India and Southeast Asia at the business. In his new role, he will promote Twitter, Vine and Periscope to publishing companies and media firms across both regions.

In a statement, Jaitly said he wanted to “bring more premium non-English content onto Twitter” and “increase our engagement with emerging talent and digital natives”.

Twitter said Jaitly would expand the media teams in Australia, India and Japan, and push on into Greater China — mainland China and Taiwan — as well as Southeast Asia. Government censorship is unlikely to cause too much concern given that state-owned Chinese publisher Xinhua is a big user of Twitter and publishes daily reviews of China’s news on the platform.

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