Real-time capacity makes Twitter a mobile-first company: Rishi Jaitley

With over 600 million active ‘Tweeps’, India is now considered the sixth most-active Twitter nation. Small wonder, telecom major Vodafone, which has over 1 lakh Tweeps among its patrons in India, announced an exclusive partnership with Twitter on Monday. Vodafone hopes to take their number to 2.1 crore -- or half its internet user base. Rishi Jaitley, India market director for Twitter, tells Beryl Menezes how such strategies are key to Twitter’s India growth story. Excerpts from the interview:

How will the partnership with Vodafone aid Twitter?
While we have tied up with all operators and device manufacturers for SMS-based tweets since the time Twitter was introduced in India, the exclusive partnership with Vodafone, offering free 90 days access to Twitter for Android app for all new and existing Vodafone internet users, is to encourage data access on mobile Internet by attracting users with an engaging platform that they are familiar with – that is, Twitter. We are open to similar partnerships with other telcos in future.

What is Twitter doing differently to engage users in India?
Twitter’s agenda has always been to learn, listen and engage with users, and help them to connect on a personal level with people and subjects that are close to them. Our IPL partnership is a recent example of Twitter’s consumer connect - with IPL’s Twitter followers growing from 400 to 1 million in just eight weeks. We also partner with organisations to provide easier Twitter access to employees.

About two months ago, we introduced Twitter cards that allow publishers and third-party application developers to publicise their content via tweets -- allowing their users to directly download their app from the company’s tweets. Besides this, there is also Topsy which provides analytics to companies to track followers and trends. Sponsored tweets is yet another option for a company to ensure worldwide visibility for their offerings via the Twitter platform.

How is Twitter’s mobile platform different from the web version?
Twitter is a mobile-first company -- and globally, we have more users on the mobile platform than the web platform. The main reason for Twitter’s rising popularity on the mobile is due to its enhanced real-time capacity, which is what the main USP of Twitter is.

Does Twitter offer local Indian language support?
Twitter supports 40 languages worldwide. In India, we allow rendering of Indian languages, as per languages supported by an individual’s device interface.