**Dick Costolo in the announcement of Promoted Products for Latin America.
Photo: Eric Gaillard / Reuters
With 140 million users that send more than 400 million messages a day, Twitter is an ideal platform for online positioning of commercial products. Two years ago, the social network started to offer advertising systems that currently provide a possibility of recruiting promoted messages, trends and accounts. Twitter’s commercial offer was initially released in the United States and then in the UK and Japan. Now, the popular micro blogging social network has announced that its advertising platform will be available in Latin America from September 2012 after the agreement with the marketing company IMS, designated to be its regional sales representative.
Therefore, Twitter’s ads will reach the Latin-American market through the company that has already participated in bringing other important online firms into the region such as Netflix. IMS will have exclusive rights to marketing the social network’s products in 40 Latin-American countries and, to that end, will form a sales team, which will focus exclusively on the social network products. The agreement does not include its operation in Brazil, which Twitter will manage directly. In this respect, the CEO of IMS Gastón Taratuta said, “Latin America is one of the markets where Twitter is growing faster and where we already see a significant interest from companies that want to use its promoted products.”
Why Latin America?
Twitter’s expansion to Latin America is one of the fastest in the world. According to comScore, already more than 27 million people in the region use this social network. The same agency says that in 2011, the platform’s penetration into the region has increased by 60%. In addition, according to Semiocast report, Latin America has six countries out of twenty with more Twitter accounts, with Brazil taking the second position worldwide.
As an emerging market, there are no doubts that Latin America is extremely attractive for online projects that go for the maximum effectiveness in terms of resources and results. The truth is the plans of Twitter’s expansion worldwide have become very important in recent months, and not just in advertising. During 2011, the company opened two new offices in the UK and Ireland, and in March 2012 announced it would open new facilities in Berlin. These local branches are in addition to the ones in Japan, where the social network has been present since 2008.
The growth of Twitter and its interest for continued expansion posed a question of what will be its next strategy for business development and if its advertising system will continue to expand into new countries, where it’s presently not available. The truth is that the social network is very quiet about its future plans, but there is no doubt that Twitter’s intention is to keep promoting its advertizing platform, so it will not be surprising that in a short time more of its promotional products will be used worldwide.
