Twitter to tap China market from Hong Kong office

95 mn Chinese bypassed ban to visit Twitter in November

Microblogging site Twitter would set up an office in Hong Kong early next year to serve Chinese users and advertisers, the company said last week. The move would be aimed at tapping the world’s largest internet population, even as the censors in Mainland China have shut out the American company from that market since 2009.

Twitter is bullish on China, and it has reasons to be so. Despite the ban, a little more than 95 million Chinese internet users — a sixth of the country’s total internet population — visited Twitter in November, revealed a GlobalWebIndex study.

Twitter, however, said the Hong Kong office would mainly house its sales business, and hoped to “help advertisers reach the global market”. The decision came within months of Twitter Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo’s first visit to China — a “personal” trip — in March.

RESTRICTED ENTRY

• Google, Facebook and Twitter were banned by the Chinese government
• LinkedIn is the only American social networking site to crack the Chinese market

TWITTER VS CHINA'S WEIBO
Weibo

• 144 million active monthly users
• 400 million total user base

Twitter

• 284 million users globally
• Three-fourths from outside the US
• Asia-Pacific the fastest-growing region

OFFICES IN HONG KONG:

• Google and Facebook opened offices in 2011
• Twitter to open one early next year

Though Twitter is not present in China at present, it gets advertisements from Chinese firms like Lenovo for other markets.

“While it is banned in China, the company would primarily target advertisements from Chinese companies with operations in other markets, or the ones who are looking at entering global markets. On the other hand, Twitter may look at a model, similar to what LinkedIn has done, by having a local language version,” said a social media analyst based in Mumbai.

By deciding to set up an office in Hong Kong, Twitter has joined Google and Facebook, which had opened their respective offices there in 2011.

China at present has its own Twitter-like microblogging site, Weibo, a subsidiary of internet company Sina that is part-owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba. Like Twitter, the Nasdaq-listed Weibo is a social platform where people can post 140 Chinese characters as real-time messages. It has more than 144 million active monthly users, which is more than half of Twitter’s global user base. Digital research agency China Internet Watch recently noted that Weibo’s overall user base — those operating through desktops or mobile phones — had reached 400 million.

China’s huge internet user base presents itself as an attractive proposition for Twitter, whose monthly user base grew only 5.9 per cent to 284 million at the end of September this year from 271 million at the end of June.

Besides, three-fourths of its total global user base were from outside the US, while the Asia-Pacific region emerged as the fastest-growing one for it.

LinkedIn, the only American social-networking platform that has so far managed to crack the Chinese market, in February this year unveiled a site in Mandarin to cater to the market better. It also has a different brand name for the country — pronounced ‘ling ying’. Its target is to get about 140 million professionals hooked on to LinkedIn’s Chinese version, established in a joint venture with Sequoia China and China Broadband Capital (CBC).