Twitter Partners With Komli Media To Beef Up Ad Revenues In India

If you were wondering if Facebook, the world’s largest social network is only growing its presence in India and engaging with marketers, then think again. According to a latest story at The Hindu, the 140 character social network, Twitter may soon launch targeted advertising in the country to beef up its ad revenues from a booming market.

The first move Twitter made was by hiring Rishi Jaitley in last November who is the Twitter India Country Head and has been responsible for building the India base. In doing so Twitter India has partnered with Komli Media APAC’s Leading Digital Media Network as its ad sales partner in India.

It is being speculated that with this deal in place, Komli Media will start selling ‘promoted products’ or advertising on Twitter in India. Promoted trends that appear at the top of the trending topics for next 24 hours and Promoted accounts, which will appear at the top of ‘who to follow’ recommendations are the two major products that would be pitched to companies to reach out to their users on the platform.

The deal that has also been confirmed by Twitter, is looking to tap into newer revenue streams to reach its global sales target of $1 billion by 2014. And, definitely emerging markets will play a bigger role. Speaking on the occasion, Twitter’s spokesperson added that,

“Komli’s offering at the moment will include promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts.”

Twitter which has earlier worked with Star TV and UTV India while they promoted their individual hashtags, wants to tap the market. However there has been no clarification from Twitter on the current pricing structure.

The deal is not a very surprising one looking at the growing dominance of Komli not only in India but in the Asian continent too. Komli, which still remains the only authorized reseller of Facebook Premium Ads, has expanded its base by getting the Twitter Premium inventory.

For Komli, the Twitter deal is just an extension of their already existing partnership with Twitter. Last year it was revealed that Komli Media secured an exclusive deal to sell the range of Promoted Products of Twitter in the South East Asia region. According to the deal, Komli was supposed to manage all Southeast Asia sales for Twitter advertising products, that would also mean to educate the markets about Twitter’s products such as Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts and Promoted Trends.

For Twitter it would be a new avenue to reach out to the Indian marketers with Komli Media, which already has dominance in the country but for Komli, it is just an extension of an ongoing partnership with Twitter.