Twitter expands Singapore office as it tries out new things in Asia

Nearly two years after first opening up an office in Singapore, Twitter revealed today that it’s moving into a new and larger office in the city as the social network doubles down on Asia. Twitter is now calling this new space its Asia-Pacific HQ.

“The Singapore-based team has since grown to 80 staff members in less than two years,” says Twitter’s Aliza Knox. “[We] moved to a new office space to accommodate the company’s plans to more than double its workforce.”

Knox, who’s Twitter’s managing director of online sales for APAC, tells Tech in Asia that the new space houses staff for sales, partnerships, marketing, HR, finance, user services, legal, policy, and trust and safety. In the future, Twitter says it’ll hire technical staff for the APAC HQ, including data analytics professionals and product specialists.

New markets

It’s all part of a major push into Asia by Twitter, which is seeking out fast-growing markets to bolster the network’s sluggish growth. Recently, Knox and a handful of Twitter execs were in China – where Twitter is blocked by authorities – to encourage more Chinese tech companies and startups to use Twitter and its ad platform to reach new markets as they expand beyond China.

The biggest new addition to the Singapore office is what’s called the #RealTimeLab – hashtag of course included. It’s the first time for Twitter to build this kind of facility.

Knox describes the #RealTimeLab as “Asia’s first social media centre of excellence to create, execute and share live Twitter campaigns, analytics and data visualizations with customers, partners and the community.” She goes on:

[This] is aligned with Singapore’s push to build data analytics capabilities and innovation hub. We have chosen Singapore as our grounds to create a hub of innovation as part of our next phase of regional growth for its pro-business environment with other regional leaders and customers, easy connectivity to the rest of the region, and a world-class talent pool across multiple functions.