With Twitter opening an India office, corporates and advertisers expect the micro-blogging site to tailor its offerings according to their requirements and help them reach their targeted customers.

Earlier many companies had done the same thing by leveraging the presence of Facebook and Google in India. Rajeeb Dash, Head of Marketing, Tata Housing, which uses the social media platform, said that given the diversity of markets and customers, appropriate customisation of social media marketing is necessary.

“This is easier to understand and implement if the social media company has an office presence in India.”

Companies may also be able to use Twitter’s strength to listen to their customers, using sentiment analysis and other tools to get a fix on their business and competition.

Big Bang Kiruba Shankar, CEO at social media consultancy firm Business Blogging, explained that “with Twitter’s India presence, big companies will have confidence in Twitter’s answerability and ability to handhold them on how to get the maximum bang for their marketing buck.”

Social media consultant Hitesh Motwani, who has helped major brands build their presence on social media, said: “As Facebook is private I cannot know a person’s like and dislike in minutes and tap potential customers. But Twitter is open and has more tools, such as keyword search, which brands can use.”

A Million Followers India has an estimated 20 million users on Twitter.

Besides taking up office space in India, in Mumbai, the company is also focusing on recruitment to drive key partnerships with TV channels, network carriers and operators to build a base for new revenue streams and achieve its global sales target of $1 billion in 2014.

According to a study by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and KPMG, the Indian online advertising market is expected to grow to ₹7,400 crore in 2017.

Growing online ads Jehil Thakkar, Head of Media and Advertisement, KPMG said: “Overall online advertising is growing at about 40 per cent of which social media is a smaller part leaving the market still untapped despite presence of bigger players such as Google and Facebook in this space.”

comment COMMENT NOW