Despite the fact that Twitter is banned in mainland China by the Great Firewall, Twitter needs new revenues as it’s is truly stuttering and user growth has slowed to almost non-existence. While the company is looking for more engagement in most countries, the new hire was made to drum up advertising revenue from China.
Twitter announces managing director for China
Kathy Chen, a former general manager at both Cisco and Microsoft, has been named the first Twitter managing director China. While it might seem counter-intuitive it really isn’t. Just because the world’s most populous nation can’t individually or collectively use the micro-blogging site, there are no law preventing businesses from advertising on Twitter.
Twitter opened up an office in Hong Kong in 2015 with the aims of finding new media partners as well as advertising revenue. It’s presumed that Chen will be working out of this office.
Technically, Chen is responsible for “Greater China” which includes Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China.
Today saw the micro-blogging provider announce her hiring in a statement:
“As a global platform, we are already engaged with advertisers, content providers, and influencers across Greater China to help them reach audiences around the world. Going forward, we will look to Kathy’s leadership to help us identify ways in which Twitter’s platform and technology assets can be utilized to created further value for enterprises, creators, influencers, partners, and developers in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.”
Banned companies still won’t ignore China
When you have over 1.3 billion citizens and the world’s second largest economy it doesn’t really matter if your consumer products are blocked in the Middle Kingdom, you’ll still have an interest in China. Shailesh Rao, Twitter’s vice president for Asia-Pacific, Latin America and emerging markets recently told the South China Morning Post that Twitter has enjoyed nearly 350% in growth from Chinese advertisers.
With its advertiser and analytic tools like Fabric and other, Twitter plans on continuing to woo Chinese companies and their advertising money. Along with Twitter, Facebook and Google are each effectively banned in China but continue to court the Chinese market.
That’s not going to stop anytime soon as today’s announcement from the San Francisco company made clear.
