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Is Twitter ready to go global?
By Prisma News
Category:
A couple of years ago, social media celeb Gary Vaynerchuk spoke to a meeting of techies in Portland, Oregon, many of whom were of the mind that Twitter was already passe. “You think Twitter is dead?” he exclaimed. “It hasn’t even started! Just wait until Oprah gets on it!”
Indeed he was right. Oprah and many other celebrities have joined Twitter. Today, Twitter is not only a mainstream phenomenon but has taken hold worldwide. According to a recent Twitter blog post, more than 50% of its 75 million users are from outside the U.S. What’s more, the company saw a 50% increase in signups from Spanish-speaking countries after it added a Spanish site nearly 6 months ago.
Despite those positive trends, ReadWriteWeb’s Mike Melanson argues that Twitter is still in its infancy internationally, given that it has been offering non-English versions of its site only for a matter of months.
“We compare it to Facebook all too often, and that much-repeated statistic of 400 million users, but we don’t bother to note that Facebook is also translated into more than 60 languages.
So, while Twitter is not only striving to reach mainstream America, it is still only offered in two languages and it’s a bit of a surprise that it’s become as international a service as it has. While the blog brags that Indian politicians have spurned a recent growth in India, the country is also host the second largest number of English speakers worldwide.”
Melanson sees Twitter as being hampered by its inability to translate its service into yet more languages, beyond its current offerings in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Japanese.
At the same time, Twitter will do well to continue cutting deals with mobile operators overseas, so that reading and sending tweets is possible via SMS. This is a clear advantage in less-developed parts of the world, where non-smart mobile phones far outnumber personal computers.
Meanwhile, keep an eye on Twitter’s international competitor Plurk, which reigns supreme in Taiwan and is also popular in Indonesia and Malaysia. By contrast, Plurk is accessible to varying degrees in some 35 languages.
