Twitter is experimenting with several India-first products like the dedicated Cricket Tab launched on Tuesday along with building language capabilities across 11 Indian languages, a senior executive from the microblogging site said.

Speaking to BusinessLine, Preetha Athrey, director, global business marketing, Twitter APAC said, “India continues to be one of our priority markets at Twitter, and we’re deeply committed to serving the public conversation here. To cater to the diversities in India, we’ve been making updates at the product level. We’ve learnt that people are increasingly becoming inclined to following and engaging in conversations in their native language or language of choice, so we’ve been building our language capabilities to cater to this preference.”

Currently, Tweet is available in more than 11 Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.

Meanwhile, Twitter is testing an India-only Cricket Tab which went live on Tuesday for Android users. Users will be able to access relevant Twitter-first content, live scores, customised cricket-team based emojis and hashtags, under a single landing point. According to the company, between January 2021 - January 2022, a whopping 4.4 million Indians on Twitter shared 96.2 million Tweets about cricket.

“Last year, we started testing the Cricket Twitter - India Community to make it easier for fans to find each other and engage in conversations. We had also launched a live Scorecard so fans could follow ball-by-ball score updates without having to switch away their favourite second-screen for cricket action. This season, we’re testing a dedicated Cricket Tab on Twitter’s Explore page – which will serve as the one-stop-destination for all things cricket,” Athrey said.

Creating advertising campaigns

Twitter has been actively partnering and working with brands to ideate and develop campaigns.

“One of our key offerings for brands is a deep-rooted understanding of Twitter’s audience that our teams of experts have been gathering by keeping a close watch on the public conversation. Everything that brands do is to stay connected, relevant, and top-of-mind among audiences. At Twitter, our teams guide brands through the how of it - by banking on conversation insights, consumer interests and behavioural patterns, we assist brands in devising messages and campaigns that audiences are interested in, and can relate to,” she said.

Case in point, the #NetflixMatchmaker campaign that we conceptualised and launched in partnership with Netflix India. Twitter found that most users were trying to find what next to binge. Banking on this trend, it custom-created a solution and the Emoji Engine. After Netflix launched its #NetflixMatchmaker campaign, users based on their moods, and for each Tweet with an emoji, Netflix rewarded audiences with recommendations for their next weekend binge.

The Twitter team actively tracks and analyses the behaviours and conversations of the users, shifting it to become more community and interest focussed that personality or people driven. “They are now more aware and conscious of what they care about, and are actively seeking conversations that are more personalised, nuanced and aligned with their individual preferences. Owing to this inclination towards following interest-specific interests, we had introduced Twitter Topics in 2019,” Athrey said.

Topics use machine learning to deliver subject-related Tweets to people’s timelines, and Twitter offers Topics across conversation categories including Sports, Cricket, Entertainment, Gaming, Books, NFTs, among several others. In fact, globally, there are more than 14,500 Topics across 11 languages including Hindi and approximately 280 million accounts follow at least one of these Topics.

Voice-based interactions

Following the launch of Twitter Topics, the micro-blogging site introduced voice tweets and voice DMs. Last year, it started testing Spaces, a live audio feature to connect like-minded users to have nuanced conversations.

Athrey said, “Since the rollout, we’ve been learning from the feedback of millions of people who have been using Spaces and are making improvements to the product. With Spaces, we want to bring together the diverse audiences on our service – which, when speaking of India, transcend beyond interests to include diversity of geographies, cultures, and linguistic preferences.”

“To make it easier for people to find and connect with others who like to talk about the same things, we started testing Communities last year. In Q4 2021, we launched the first Community outside of the US in India focused on Cricket: Cricket Twitter - India,” she added.

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