Coffee Chat: Twitter’s Future in Southeast Asia (Live Blog)

Aliza Knox, Managing Director of Online Sales at Twitter, takes stage at Startup Asia 2013 to talk Twitter’s presence in southeast Asia, advice for startups using the platform, and her personal journey from being a “Googler” to a “Tweep”.

#10:12: Aliza is Twitter’s first employee in Asia outside Japan. She has loads of experience in the region, having lived and worked in Australia and Singapore for most of her adult life. The Singapore Twitter office, she says, is “currently in her apartment.”

#10:15: Twitter’s all about the birds, she says. You don’t join a team, you join the “flock”. 70% of Twitter’s users are outside the US, and around 25% are in Asia.

#10:16: Twitter’s 140 character limit came from the SMS limit of 160 characters (plus an allowance for long usernames). It was designed from the ground up to work great on everything from feature phones to tablets.

Twitter is used very simlarly around the world, Alica says. it’s like a “town hall”. A common public space to share local news and happenings. It’s also become a lifeline, particularly in Asia, for disaster response – to find people, organize rescues or share updates.

#10:17: Two things that are different in Asia: extensive use of Twitter on non-smartphones. In places like Japan, the character base is different – 140 characters in China or Japan is much longer than an update, almost a short story.

#10:18: Alica’s advice to startups: Learn to use Twitter organically first. Twitter is an “interest graph”, not a “social graph”. That makes it more interesting.

#10:20: Advice #2: Talk to people the way you would have a conversation. Tweet whatever you want, but think about what people are interested in. Would the TechInAsia readership, for instance, be interested in what we had for breakfast? (Readers: would you? I had Kopi-O and a curry puff!)

#10:23: Aliza is taking the floor solo now. Twitter thinks of itself as a tech company in the media space, she says. Multilayered, complex interactions are the now norm on Twitter. Here’s some fun trivia: How long did it take Twitter to reach their first billion tweets? 3 years, 2 months 1 day. How long does it take now? 2.5 days.

#10:27: A tour of Twitter’s interface now: The only thing companies can buy is the top space on a mobile interface. It can be purchased for a day, and is usually used for launch announcements.
“We throttle the amount of promotions anyone sees per day,” she says. Twitter will never be a “spammy ad platform.”

#10:35: Twitter launched at the end of January 2013 in Singapore, and is currently selling in 5 countries in SE Asia through Komli Media. It’s very early days. Local success stories so far: Singtel.

#10:37: Aliza’s final message: We’re happy to be here just as a platform to help startups connect with customers. Round of applause. Onwards and upwards!