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  • Twitter Looks to Indonesia to Boost Growth

    Twitter Looks to Indonesia to Boost Growth

    A year after announcing it would open an office in Jakarta, Twitter has finally hired a team to develop business in the market of 250 million people as the company works to overcome weak global growth in users and advertising revenues.

    The Indonesia team will focus on business development and marketing, with staff dedicated to building media partnerships, selling advertising and public policy development, Parminder Singh, managing director for Twitter in Southeast Asia, India, North Africa and the Middle East said in an interview.

    Mr. Singh wouldn’t give the number of new staff, saying only that hiring is at an early stage but is growing “very rapidly.”

    “Across a spectrum of functions, we are staffed here to do business,” he said.

    In March, Twitter’s then-Chief Executive Dick Costolo visited Jakarta to announce the office opening, but Mr. Singh said it took time to get the regulatory approvals needed and set up the physical office infrastructure.

    Rick Mulia, the country business head appointed in March, resigned in June citing personal reasons. He’s since been replaced by Roy Simangunson, former country manager for Yahoo Indonesia.

    Twitter is looking to emerging markets like Indonesia that are fast embracing smartphones and social media as user growth levels off in more developed markets and revenue bounces back from a hit it took last year after the company made changes to some of its ad functions.

    In the second quarter of the year the microblogging site recorded revenues of $502 million, growth of 61% from a year earlier and well above its own projections. But user growth has been sluggish.

    Core monthly active users– those who access Twitter via the Web or mobile at least once a month–stood at 304 million in the first quarter, up from 302 million in the first three months of the year.

    Boosting those numbers is where Indonesia matters. The world’s fourth most populous country has gained global attention for its voracious use of social media, and Jakarta has been deemed the world’s most active Twitter city.

    While the company doesn’t give out user numbers by country, it considers Indonesia one of its top emerging markets and Mr. Singh called it a “bright spot” in the Asia-Pacific, a region he dubbed Twitter’s “growth engine.”

    Indonesia is “the next phase of our growth,” said Mr. Singh.

    A key part of the company’s business strategy in Jakarta, he said, will focus on building partnerships with agencies and big-name advertisers, such as banks and telecom companies, and on launching new products to draw in users.

    While more than three-fourths of the company’s users are outside the U.S., only 36% of its revenue is derived internationally.

    Targeting mobile users will also be a focus in Indonesia, since about 88% of the company’s overall advertising revenue comes from mobile. Although Internet penetration rates remain low in Indonesia, the majority of people get online through their mobile phones, and the number of smartphones is seeing rapid growth.

    Twitter’s acquisition of India-based ZipDial earlier this year could also potentially be used to help it reach millions more on feature phones. The platform allows users to access Twitter through mobile messaging. When these users were included in the company’s second quarter user data, its user base grew to 316 million from 308 million.

    “For a lot of people their first experience on the Internet will be using a mobile phone,” Mr. Singh said. “That makes us very well placed to leverage the entire mobile revolution and mobile popularity in this region.”

    In March, the company opened an office in Hong Kong to build up advertising dollars and reach out to rapidly growing developers and smartphone makers. Mr. Singh said the company “would love to be in China from a usage point of view,” but is currently focused on business development through Hong Kong.

    In June the company announced plans to double its staff in Singapore. It also has offices in India Australia, Korea, and Japan.

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  • Twitter appoints new boss for Indonesia

    Twitter appoints new boss for Indonesia

    Twitter has appointed Roy Simangunsong as the company’s country business head in Indonesia.

    “It’s my first day at work, so there’s no strategy to apply yet, but what is important for the audiences and advertisers are my confidence in running and developing this company. Because, at the end of the day, Twitter wouldn’t want us to innovate on things that disrupt the users’ experience,” said Roy as quoted by Antara news agency on Tuesday.

    Indonesia has around 80 million Internet users, according to Roy, and around 150 million smartphone subscribers and almost 80 percent of Twitter users worldwide access the application from their mobile phones.

    Prior to Roy, the business head position had been held by Rick Mulia from November 2014. Rick resigned in June, leaving the position vacant for two months.

    Roy was previously the country business head at Yahoo! Indonesia and other multinational companies like Microsoft and IBM. His last position before becoming Twitter Indonesia’s number one person was chief executive officer for Okezone digital media company.

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  • Now, you can shop on Twitter

    Now, you can shop on Twitter

    Twitter has announced that the company is launching a product and place pages that allows users to discover and purchase items within the service.

    According to the Verge, the new pages will organise related tweets about products and brands on dedicated pages.

    A product page will let people see others’ tweets about that product, prices, and, sometimes, a buy button.

    The company is also rolling out what it’s calling Collections, a way for brands and celebrities to curate products and recommend them to followers.

    This is the second new feature Twitter has unveiled this week after announcing Project Lightning, a news platform that would allow users to follow events instead of people.

  • Facebook, Twitter to drive online shopping growth

    Facebook, Twitter to drive online shopping growth

    New data from Juniper Research predicts global eCommerce sales will reach $1.7 trillion this year – up more than 17 per cent on last year.

    And while recent growth has been buoyed by expansion of public Wi-Fi networks and 4G, the next round of growth will be driven by social media companies creating direct sales platforms.

    The new research, Mobile & Online Purchases: Cards, Carrier Billing & Third Party Payment Platforms 2015-2020 concludes that Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram have already launched ‘buy’ buttons on their mobile apps.

    “Such players are also likely to enhance their sales prospects through strategic retailer partnerships, with Twitter already enabling users to link their accounts to Amazon,” the report said.

    The research also finds that online retailers are increasingly seeking to reduce time-to-consumer by launching same-day delivery, while ‘bricks and mortar’ stores now widely offered next-day in-store collection – often charging a premium for this option.

    But Juniper cautions that retailers need to deliver a consistency of message, branding and shopping experience across all channels.

    “Integration between in-store and online is critical if retailers want to maximise the extent to which they can identify a unique individual’s omnichannel shopping habits,” the report said.

    Author Dr Windsor Holden said the key is to ensure consumers are allowed to choose their own path to purchase rather than have it effectively mandated by channel limitations.

    The report also concludes that smartphones will account for more than 40 per cent of online transactions by 2020.

    “While carrier billing should provide content providers with a key mechanism for monetising digital content, its use for buying physical goods is likely to be limited by comparatively higher share of revenues demanded by network operators and billing platforms.”

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  • Twitter searching for new Indonesia boss as Rick Mulia quits to move back to Wego

    Twitter searching for new Indonesia boss as Rick Mulia quits to move back to Wego

    Rick MuliaRick Mulia, who joined Twitter to launch its Indonesian operation just eight months ago, has left the company to move back to his former employer, Wego.

    Mulia joined Twitter from Wego in November, five months before the official opening of the Jakarta office in March.

    Twitter told Mumbrella that Mulia was leaving for personal reasons and is searching for a replacement to lead what is one of the micro-blogging service’s most important strategic markets.

    He is to stay with the company until the end of this month.

    “First, we would like to thank Rick Mulia for his contributions and leadership for opening Twitter’s office in Indonesia, one of our largest and most important markets in the world. Rick is based in Singapore and the role of Indonesia Business Head requires him to move to Jakarta,” Twitter told Mumbrella in a statement.

    “However, he is unable to make the move now due to personal reasons. So we are actively looking for his replacement in Indonesia and will have some news shortly to share with you. We remain committed to Indonesia and will continue to invest in our operations there as we have many exciting plans for the rest of the year,” Twitter said.

    The highly regarded former Microsoft and Yahoo! executive was brought in to lead a team to turn Twitter’s “local popularity into revenue” in Indonesia.

    Mulia was previously running Wego’s media and advertising solutions function and oversaw the firm’s global real-time bidding function.

    He rejoins Wego in the role of chief advertising and media officer, Asia Pacific, based in Singapore. His role is to lead both direct and programmatic sales for the firm.

    “I’m extremely pleased that Rick Mulia will be rejoining the leadership team at Wego and managing our fast growing advertising & media business,” said Ross Veitch, CEO and co-founder of Wego in a statement.

    “Rick is a well-respected digital professional with a rare combination of technical, sales and managerial skills that make him the perfect choice to develop and deliver advertising solutions for Wego’s travel industry clients.”

    Mulia commented: “I am looking forward to returning to Wego and helping the company achieve the next level of growth. In the time I’ve been away I’ve been highly impressed to see the company’s growth in emerging regions such as the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and in particular, explosive growth in their mobile audience. These are both a boon for the ad tech space where these types of audience data are in high demand.”

    “My focus is to make Wego and its audience data a must-have purchase for any travel advertiser investing in Direct Performance or Programmatic Ad Buying,” he said.

  • Skilled Opinion: Making social media work for SMEs

    Skilled Opinion: Making social media work for SMEs

    In at present’s super-connected, always-on period, companies of just about any measurement can attain markets and clients past their borders with unprecedented ease. For a lot of SMEs, the speedy progress of cross-border e-commerce – tipped to be value USD2 trillion this yr within the B2C area alone based on Bigcommerce – makes the chance too worthwhile to disregard. In accordance with Aaron Levie, the CEO and co-founder of Field, a cloud-based on-line storage firm in San Francisco, “A producing start-up in Boston can join with a beforehand impossible-to-reach provider in China; a advertising company in New York can instantaneously collaborate with a shopper in London; a providers agency in France can have software program developed in India.”

    In lots of respects, know-how acts as the good leveler, opening up international commerce that was as soon as the unique protect of huge multinationals. SMEs on eBay are virtually as more likely to export as giant companies, based on Joshuta P. Meltzer from his ebook Utilizing the Web to Promote Providers Exports by Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises. Nevertheless, the Seizing Cross-Border Alternative by Forrester Consulting believes that SMEs nonetheless should grapple with challenges that their bigger rivals do not face. Servicing a worldwide buyer base means overcoming issues corresponding to time zones, and language and cultural nuances. Small companies not often have the time or assets to spend money on outsourced customer support help, and a few are discovering it extra environment friendly to serve clients by way of social media platforms: one LinkedIn research from 2014 revealed that 81 % of North American SMEs use social media.

    With out the massive devoted digital and social media workforce that many giant manufacturers have, even this will appear daunting. Nevertheless, a couple of easy ideas can generate outcomes for SMEs that make investments the required effort and time.

    Construct a following. Probably the most finely-honed messages and delightful content material will not have a lot influence if solely two dozen social media “followers” ever get to see it. Corporations that transfer into social media want to make sure that they’ve a enough base of followers for his or her social platforms to be an efficient channel. UK-based on-line gaming firm Betfair.com achieved this by establishing an lively Twitter presence in 2009 with frequent updates on all kinds of sports activities and witty, artistic content material that’s related to its followers (who as we speak quantity virtually 120,000 individuals). Constructing a following might imply subsidiary investments – for instance, in promoting. LinkedIn, Fb and Twitter all permit corporations with small budgets of just some US dollars per day to promote by way of recommended posts, beneficial followers and different means.

    Keep in mind, you are the beginner! Penny Energy, writer of the UK’sDigital Enterprise Britain Manifesto and founder the Digital Youth Academy, says “Should you’d simply moved in to a city or village, you would not open the door of your new native pub and shout that you are a plumber or an architect and other people ought to offer you enterprise. You’d take part with what was happening round you, chat to individuals and allow them to know what you do, in order that they find out about you once they want your service. It is precisely the identical in social media.” Present on-line communities similar to Fb pages, LinkedIn communities or Twitter hashtags within the markets an organization is making an attempt to penetrate might present the footholds it must construct a following amongst clients in new markets.

    This was the expertise of Herschel Provide Co., a Canadian producer of backpacks and outside items. By taking the time to study every social platform, the corporate was far better-positioned to attraction to followers on every. “Totally different social networks appeal to totally different audiences,” says Allison Butala, Herschel Provide’s social media supervisor. “Our Instagram account attracts aspiring photographers; our Pinterest following caters extra in the direction of females; Twitter attracts these concerned about our product releases and information tales. Understanding this, we share related content material and develop distinct communities.”

    High quality, not amount. A couple of thousand followers who’re genuinely gained over by your providing are much more priceless than tons of of hundreds who “appreciated” a Fb web page merely to participate in a promotion. Construct a fame for actual experience by researching the individuals and points which have the most important affect within the markets your organization is concentrating on. Use the tone and method of your standing updates to place your organization as having the identical attributes clients would worth in an actual individual – assume friendliness, approachability or a way of humour. These steps will assist your organization to develop a particular social media “voice” and stand out from the gang, in line with The Guardian article How SMEs could make one of the best use of social media.

    Discover out what works via fixed monitoring. The Guardian articles How SMEs could make the perfect use of social media tells us that there is no substitute for expertise, so you’ll want to make sure you’re monitoring the outcomes of your engagements with social media followers. Various free instruments will make it easier to do that. For instance, Socialmention.com is a web-based platform that gives real-time social media search and evaluation. It could trawl the web for mentions of your small business or merchandise. Instruments like this shortly make it easier to to develop a really feel for what techniques work greatest. Christy Ng, founding father of Malaysian shoe design SME Christy Ng Footwear, has two devoted members of employees to handle the corporate’s presence on Fb, Instagram and Pinterest. “We do all our social media administration in-house – from monitoring and listening, to deciding what content material will probably be partaking for our followers,” she says. “For instance, a variety of content material is footage of our merchandise, as a result of we all know that that is what our clients need to see.”

    Finally, social media shouldn’t be an finish in itself – the actual yardstick of success is how a lot enterprise is coming in. However by studying from the specialists, making a acutely aware dedication to social media as a gross sales or customer support channel and leveraging their inherent flexibility and adaptableness as small organizations, SMEs can get it proper and reap the advantages.