Twitter revenues rise fivefold in India following video promotion

According to Twitter, its revenue in India increased by five times over the last year following a video promotion. Parminder Singh, MD for India, Southeast Asia and MENA at Twitter, said that video consumption is on the rise, making up over 36% of mobile data in India, with a 100% increase in Indian advertisers wishing to promote videos in their campaigns. Although Twitter has not disclosed the total number of brands or campaigns using the feature, the company claims that campaign engagement increases by 40% through the use of promoted videos, and purchase intent of consumers increases by 44%.

NEW DELHI: Twitter is aggressively pushing businesses to use video to promote themselves on the microblogging site and the strategy seems to be paying off. The company said consumption of its flagship promoted video feature in India shot up five-fold over the last year.Though Twitter did not disclose the total number of such campaigns or brands using it, the auto playing video feature has been attempted by the likes of BMW Nestle , Cisco, Myntra and Samsung.This comes even as the San Franciscoheadquartered company is simultaneously pushing its live broadcasting tool, Periscope, as well as the six-second loop video feature, Vine, in India.Parminder Singh, managing director for India, Southeast Asia , Middle East and North Africa at Twitter, said video consumption in the country is on a rise and local brands are catching onto this trend with a 100% increase in Indian advertisers using promoted video in their campaigns. “Over 36% of mobile data in the country consists of video and almost 90% of all video views globally are done over the mobile,” Singh told ET in an interview.He said as per the company’s estimates, a campaign's engagement goes by 40% when the advertiser uses promoted video and the purchase intent of consumers increase by 44%. In order to monetise its operations, Twitter gave businesses a handful of options to market themselves through the platform. These included promoted tweets, promoted accounts and promoted trends — where a company or an institution could pay for creating a widespread debate on a pressing issue.Over the past one year, Twitter has been actively pushing for its video offering, the uptake of which has been accentuated by the auto play feature. Now launched by Facebook as well, this feature ensures that a video starts to play automatically as soon as the user scrolls down to it without any manual interventions, ensuring more eyeballs. The jump in Twitter’s video business also coincides with the company’s strategy of having a hybrid model of marketing.Apart from having a marketing partner in Komli Media to sell advertising products, a year ago Twitter decided to build its own brand and marketing team. Singh said going forward the team will be strengthened, given the potential of the Indian market.Singh said apart from the existing plain vanilla offerings, brands are now more open to using innovation and technology to up the excitement during products launches.