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 This week, the popular microblog platform has made presentations to
prospective Chinese clients in Shanghai on the sidelines of the
inaugural Consumer Electronics Show Asia.
"It's not a coincidence that we are here now," Peter Greenberger,
director of sales for emerging markets at Twitter, told Reuters on
Tuesday.
"This seems to be a moment in time where Chinese corporations really
feel the urge to be global and in fact, there's even a mandate from
the government saying 'go global', which is exciting."
The San Francisco-based company already works with Chinese
smartphone maker Xiaomi, online shopping giant Alibaba Group, white
goods producer Qingdao Haier and flag carrier Air China to target
customers abroad.
Twitter collected $436 million in first-quarter revenue from
advertisers who paid to inject their ads, known as "promoted
tweets", in to Twitter users' timelines. The company has 302 million
users worldwide.
The Chinese authorities have rendered the microblog unavailable in
China without a virtual private network (VPN) since 2009. Still,
Chinese entities, including the state news agency Xinhua, use the
platform to reach audiences abroad.
Domestically, the Sina Weibo microblogging platform and Tencent's
WeChat messaging app are widely used.
"Obviously we hope the government will change their minds about us
but until then, we can only do what we can do which is to help
companies go out, that's where our opportunity is," said a Twitter
source when asked about Twitter being blocked in China. The person
was not authorized to speak to the media and declined to be
identified.
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In a keynote speech on Tuesday, Twitter Vice President Shailesh Rao
told a largely-Chinese audience how business leaders such as Tesla
Motors CEO Elon Musk and Air Asia CEO Tony Fernandas use Twitter to
connect with customers and investors, and how the platform could be
useful for Chinese companies looking to do business abroad.
"We've tried lots of different ways to advertise to overseas
customers but at the moment we're focused on using Twitter, Google
and Facebook," said Liu Dongchuan, director of advertising at Boyaa,
a Hong Kong listed online game developer that began advertising on
Twitter in August last year.
"The reason is because you know these users are real users, active
users, not zombie users."
(Editing by Kazunori Takada, John Ruwitch and David Evans)
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