Twitter has launched a self-service advertising platform for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in India, the social networking service announced on Thursday.
Twitter has expanded the platform reach of Twitter ads globally from 33 countries to over 200 countries and territories.
“Now, SMBs from India to Iceland can more effectively reach their target audiences on Twitter in 15 languages. In addition, Twitter also announced the total active advertisers, including SMBs to be approximately 100,000,” the company said in a statement.
“Small and medium-sized businesses face the most challenges and are least resourced to promote the good work they do.
“With the expansion of the Twitter self-service ads platform, we are excited to give SMBs level the playing field with digital advertising to increase their sales,” Emily Huo, SMB lead for Asia Pacific at Twitter said in the statement.
There are 51 million SMBs in India, according to market research firm Zinnov.
Start-ups registered in India are projected to go up to a whopping 11,500 by 2020, independent consultancy KPMG reports.
“Anyone with a small business, from tech start-ups to retail, and even mom and pop shops, can now use our platform to target and engage in real-time with more than 316 million active Twitter users worldwide and increase sales,” the statement added.
Twitter top source for breaking news
Among all social networking platforms, micro-blogging site Twitter is the top source for users when it comes to breaking news, a new online survey of more than 4,700 social media users has revealed.
Nearly nine in 10 Twitter (86 percent) users in the survey said they use Twitter for news, and the vast majority of those (74 percent) do so daily.
“Roughly the same number of people reported that they use Twitter to be alerted to breaking news (40 percent) as to keep up with the news generally (39 percent),” said the survey conducted by the American Press Institute and Twitter in collaboration with research company called DB5.
Twitter users tend to be heavier news consumers than other social media users.
“News, indeed, is one of the primary activities that they engage in on the network. Twitter users also tend to be younger than social media users in general,” the findings revealed.
Three-quarters of Twitter news users follow individual journalists, writers and commentators (73 percent) and nearly two-thirds follow institutional accounts (62 percent).
Twitter users also are very likely to discover new journalists and writers and consequently follow their work, often on other platforms beyond Twitter, the survey indicated.
The Twitter users tend to use the service heavily – several times a day – and their use of the network is increasing how much news they consume.
“Almost all Twitter users are also consumers of other forms of news media,” a statement by the American Press Institute read.
While Twitter users follow news in general on the service, and sometimes do so just as a way of passing time, they act differently when they are following breaking news.
They become more participatory – commenting, posting and sharing at moments when events are moving fastest.
“All of these offer signals for how news publishers can make more effective use of social networks in general and Twitter in particular,” the results showed.
Nearly 94 percent of Twitter news users get their news either through scrolling their timelines or browsing tweets of those they follow.
Other features are used far less often. For instance, just 34 percent of Twitter news users say they get news from trending topics and 30 percent use search.
About 82 percent of Twitter users access the platform on their phones and many access Twitter across multiple devices.
The findings come at time when Twitter is increasing its emphasis on news and making tweaks that may affect publishers’ strategies, the authors concluded.
IANS
