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San-Francisco based micro-blogging site Twitter’s famous blue bird is off to a flying start in India, eyeing to take on more tweeple under its wing.
First came the top-level hires, and then new office-spaces in pricey Mumbai. Twitter is believed to have taken three offices in Lower Parel, Thane and Vashi as part of its tie-up with global business centre provider Regus.
This, in addition to recently opened offices in Bangalore, is besides plans for New Delhi.
The company’s main Mumbai office is located at Regus office complex in Mumbai’s upmarket Peninsula Business Park, Lower Parel. Though this office space was handed over to Twitter in May last year, the company recently took possession and has begun operating from there, a real estate source said.
Regus is a Luxembourg-based company providing over 1,500 ready-to-move-in or fully-serviced business centres across 600 cities. Clients of Regus, listed on the London Stock Exchange, include Fortune 500 companies, start-ups and small and medium-sized companies across various sectors.
Twitter India, which has 8.43 lakh followers so far, is also on a recruitment drive to glean talent from rivals Google and Facebook, to help beef up its sales and business development teams in Delhi and Mumbai. Detailed plans are still under wraps, but an official announcement to unveil them is expected soon, according to Advertising and PR firm, Ogilvy, which handles the company’s media campaign. An e-mail to Twitter’s top management in India went unanswered.
Top hires Twitter appointed Parminder Singh as Managing Director India, South-East Asia and Middle-East-North-Africa, two months ago. He was former Managing Director, Google Display Solution Sales for Asia-Pacific. The earlier hire was former Director of Knight Foundation Rishi Jaitly in 2012 as Twitter’s India Market Director.
While Singh is based in Singapore, Jaitly, who earlier worked as the head of public-private partnerships at Google, works out of the Regus office in Mumbai.
The appointment of former journalist Raheel Khursheed, as the head of news, politics and government in Twitter India earlier this month had incurred the wrath of the right wing, which demanded his removal by Twitter alleging that he was anti-Narendra Modi.
According to industry watchers, the company is aiming to differentiate itself from Facebook by focusing on opportunities in the live-cast space – sports, news, entertainment and politics to build advertising revenues through the social media connect.
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