Brace yourself, Tweeps, as Twitter plans to open an office here in Indonesia in the next three to six months. The plan itself was confirmed by Adam Brain, Twitter’s Global President of Revenue and Partnership, in an interview session with the Wall Street Journal (paid content). He also stated that the Jakarta-based office, which will be the first in Southeast Asia (let alone the Twitter’s regional office in Singapore), would focus on sales and business development.
“You look at Indonesia and you see the size of the audience there and how they’re using Twitter, and it’s super-invigorating. Overall it will be a pretty cross-functional office for us in terms of the roles of the people inside the office and the different specialties that the team has,” Adam added.
This office in Jakarta would be Twitter’s second in Southeast Asia, after the previous one in Singapore. Twitter itself has established offices in a number of countries in Asia Pacific, such as Seoul, Tokyo, and Sydney. Unfortunately, Adam didn’t want to leak their recruitment process and number of staff required. Twitter itself would be the second social media giant to establish an office in the country after Facebook. The Mark Zuckerberg-owned company has already opened its own in last March, after a year of employing remote employees.
We have been investigating the arrival of a number of Twitter officials to Indonesia in this past year. Apparently, their arrival was intended to check the local condition and, later, establish an office in the country. The highly adoptive-to-social-media-services Indonesian market has undoubtedly become an ultimate proposal for foreign investors to spend their money here, just like what Twitter and Facebook do.
Twitter, which has gone public since November 2013, has never noted any profit, though it had posted $312,1 million (more than Rp 3,6 trillion) revenue in the second quarter of 2014.
According to Business Insider Intelligence, there are 22,2 million of Twitter users by the end of 2013, not to mention 240 million of Indonesian total population in which half of them are aged under 30. The latest Indonesian presidential election even became one of Twitter’s legendary hot topics, as it was mentioned in almost 95 million of tweets. This shows that Twitter has actually attributes to be majestic in Indonesian social media market.
By having 75% of its total 271 million of active users living outside the U.S, it is very logic that Twitter has never stopped opening its offices in various countries around the world. By having local offices, Twitter would be much much closer to the local publishers and marketers.
[Header illustration: Flickr/laughingsquid]
