India one of the fastest growing SMB markets for Twitter

New Delhi: Twitter today said thousands of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are advertising on its platform, making India one of its fastest growing SMB market across the world with average monthly spend per advertiser growing 60 per cent.

The micro-blogging website opened up its self-service ad platform to India in September last year and in the last four months, thousands of Indian SMBs have advertised on Twitter and the average monthly spend has grown 60 per cent per SMB advertiser, Twitter Head of SMB Sales (Asia-Pacific) Emily Huo told reporters here.

She, however, did not gave the exact number of SMBs using the platform to advertise.

"India is one of Twitter's fastest-growing SMB markets worldwide and, in just four months, is already our third largest SMB market in Asia Pacific, after Japan and Australia," she said.

She added that with Startup India initiative, India is one of its top priorities now.

"We just launched a Twitter handle which specifically teaches businesses of best practices and we have also launched our marketing website to help educate business and the points mentioned there are relevant to India," she said.

India has a flourishing entrepreneurial culture with over 51 million registered SMBs according to a Zinnov market research report in January 2015.

"We're excited to work with the Indian SMB community to help them achieve their business goals and reach over 320 million Twitter users worldwide," she said.

Asked about the company's plans for smaller cities, she said, "There are different ways to outreach the smaller markets. We do a lot of online marketing, we can also potentially partner with local players in this space. So all of that we are definitely exploring."

She said Twitter has a consolidated marketing team at present in Singapore and it will expand that.

"We will look into the demands for it (having a marketing team in India) as there is still a lot of work and momentum that we have today. We are open to having a marketing team in India but no promises as of now," she said.