Twitter has its focus on Japan to make money from companies eager to use its data to manage inventory, improve customer service and research retail trends. The micro-blogging site rarely gets paid by brands directly, and now it is going to make money through its data services.
Japan an important market for Twitter
According to the micro-blogging giant, tweets from regular people are being displayed in attractive ways in Japan, like at baseball games and events using special curation technology, presenting huge potential. Since 2011, the number of Twitter users in Japan has grown five-fold. After English, Japanese was the first language to be offered by the micro-blogging giant, and it is the most-often used non-English language on the social media platform as well.
Twitter, with about 35 million users, with help from partner companies such as NetBase and NTT Data, offers special technologies for using all the tweets, including those in the archives, and better analyzing them. In exchange, the partners get paid by the companies hoping to improve their businesses using Twitter data, Randy Almond, Twitter’s head of data business marketing, told reporters on Thursday.
Data: a remedy to all problems
Making money through online services is quite a challenge, and Twitter is tackling the problem through data analysis. The San Francisco-based company does not separately report data marketing revenue.
Monitoring consumer reactions to a new product like complaints or the demographics of users is one of the examples of information that can help in improving business, and Twitter has such data. According to Almond, all that can be tracked by tweets is Twitter data. For Instance, in the U.S., after finding out through Twitter data that loyal companies fled after their favorite baristas quit, a coffee retailer started offering baristas college scholarships to retain them as employees.
The San Francisco-based social media company says it deals properly with privacy concerns. The micro-blogging site says its biggest strength is that the information is immediate, and everything is public, unlike email or private messages. Almond said the company takes security issues seriously, and they do not surprise users because if they do, it means users may not want to use the social media platform.
On Thursday, Twitter shares closed up 0.69% at $17.52. Year to date, the stock is down by over 21%, while in the last year, it is down by over 65%.
