As Twitter celebrates its tenth anniversary, we asked Steve Kalifowitz, Twitter’s head of brand strategy and advocacy for APAC and MENA, what the next decade may hold.
Ten years ago today, on 21 March 2006, Twitter’s now-chief executive Jack Dorsey sent the platform’s first micro-blog post.
A decade on, and with over 320 million monthly active users across the world, Twitter has had a profound impact upon the way users consume media and share information.
To celebrate the tenth anniversary, and also mark tomorrow’s Festival of Media Asia Awards 2016, taking place at Twitter’s Singapore offices, M&M Global spoke to the network’s head of brand strategy and advocacy for APAC and MENA, Steve Kalifowitz.
M&M Global: Congratulations, Twitter is 10 years old… how has the platform evolved in the APAC region over the past decade?
Kalifowitz: “The evolution of Twitter in this part of the world has been somewhat similar to the rest of the world, in that it found a foothold within a niche community and then quickly became something that became mass culture.
“When I joined Twitter just over two and a half years ago, there were four or five of us in a small conference room. That is basically all we had, in a rented building. Now, here in Singapore alone we have 90 people, we have seven offices in the region in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, Japan and South Korea. We’ve seen huge expansion only in the last few years.
“Here in Singapore, I can’t tell you how excited I am to be partnering with Festival of Media Asia to do the Awards show in our office on Tuesday – to be in a space where we can host an awards show, and connect with the marketing community, is just so cool.”
What are the priorities for Twitter in APAC over the coming 12 months?
“Our primary focus is ‘live’; that’s what we do best. People come to Twitter for what’s going on right now. Live isn’t just as it’s happening, like a TV show, it has a broader meaning of what is relevant to me as a person. We know when people are waking up in the morning, and what kind of content they need in those moments. It means relevancy.
“There are five focus areas for the company which permeate everything we do:
“One, refining the iconic product. We’ve been around for 10 years. You’ve read in the newspapers that Twitter is about to die, and now we’re stronger than we’ve ever been. Very few companies do the revenue we do and growing at our growth rate – our sales are up 58% in 2015 globally, 69% internationally outside the US, and even faster in APAC.
“Two, supporting creative. A lot of people who don’t use Twitter say they don’t know what to tweet about. Why not watch what others are doing? News breaks on Twitter on average eight minutes earlier than anywhere else. Twitter can be a great place just to read. We have arguably the most interesting people in the world on our platform creating content on a regular basis. We need to help those creators make better content.
“Twitter started off as a developer community – the hashtag, the retweet, these innovations were not created by Twitter”
“Three, focus on developers. Twitter started off as a developer community – the hashtag, the retweet, these innovations were not created by Twitter. As Jack Dorsey has said, we didn’t stay true to developers for a little while, but he has been very committed to that community. In Fabric we have the biggest app developer platform in the world, with amazing tools like Crashlytics and MoPub.
“Four, safety. We acknowledge the internet is a scary place. The internet holds up a mirror to society and we don’t always like what we see. People didn’t start being mean on the internet; for some reason they seem to do it more often, or we’re more sensitive to it. Twitter is no exception. We’re doubling down on our efforts to make it safer for people to express themselves.
“Five, live video. Periscope has been incredibly successful. The pace of innovation has been incredible. The app is so easy to use and we think it’s going to grow a lot.”
