Even as Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey makes the right noises on his maiden visit to India, experts feel the social media platform has missed several opportunities to make itself relevant in the country.
“At a time when the current government is clamping down on Whatsapp as the biggest promoter of fake news, Jack meeting the opposition leader first sends out the wrong message. Also, the government officials expected Twitter officials and Jack specifically to have shared concrete steps about their plans to tackle fake news particularly when the country goes to polls next year. The timing was also critical given this was Jack’s first visit to India.
Separately, Twitter has not capitalised on localisation tools either, which will be critical for expanding into India. The result has been that newer, local platforms like “Gutrgoo”, have sprung up that will prove a challenge to Twitter in the local language space.
Also, Twitter had acquired Zipdial, but nothing concrete has been seen yet from them to capitalise on the missed call market in India and expand to Tier two and three towns. If Twitter indeed wants to step-up in the pecking order of the local social media ecosystem, then it must manage such local nuances better.
They also missed the bus on video and have not been able to build a Periscope user base that is both sticky and has the necessary recall to attract top advertising dollars. This is a missed opportunity at a time when video consumption is on the rise in India and Facebook is riding very strongly on the back of this wave.
More specifically, on the ad rates, the company needs to work out a local billing system with pricing that works for the country. Else, the advertising dollars are being well split between ace competition, Google and Facebook. They also missed the opportunity to build Moments as a product in India.
Such half-hearted attempts towards the country will only yield half-hearted results.” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, co-founder and CEO at Greyhound Research.
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Analyst:
Sanchit Vir Gogia: Sanchit is the Chief Analyst, Founder & CEO of Greyhound Research, an award-winning global research & advisory firm. To read more about him, click here.
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