Twitter's Bright Future in India’s Hands - Experts

India can help expand stagnating user base of Twitter, social media analysts assure.

Twitter is struggling with a lack of user growth; the company's stock price has declined as a result. Nevertheless, social media analysts believe that all is not lost because India holds the key to the San Francisco-based company's future. Capturing India's huge consumer base and transforming Twitter from being just about breaking or celebrity news into a full-fledged social media platform could give it the push, experts say.

Twitter needs to focus and strengthen its active user base in India, according to Vishal Tripathi, research director at global market consultancy firm Gartner. "The majority of its user base is still obscure. I recently read that over 40 percent Twitterati never tweet and just follow celebrities. I think they have to go full interactive, let ad revenue come from profit-sharing and advertisements on its platform and create a strong consumer/customer-service base," Tripathi told IANS. "This way, Twitter will become more than just a breaking news platform." Twitter has three directions to grow in: increasing user base, enabling better advertising avenues and providing content diversity, Tripathi suggests.

"Twitter is planning to set up separate servers for India to support and enhance traffic in regional languages like Hindi. They are very hopeful on India. I feel that Twitter is slowly but strongly growing and they will have a bigger user-base in the next one-two years if they keep India right on the top," said Anoop Mishra, a digital marketing and social media strategist.

India is now big on Twitter's radar but it needs to take a city-specific or region-specific advertising route. "As of now, Twitter does not have this facility as it can give ads only country-wise or followers' wise. It has to go deeper and help advertisers to reach target audiences in specific regions or geographies," Mishra said. According to him, corporations on the platform will drive revenues in the future and with customized, targeted marketing.

"Just like Facebook has this option of sharing content on a Twitter feed, Twitter should also replicate the same. Moving ahead, Twitter should devise mechanisms to develop itself as a content-creation platform, by including Twitter essays. Besides, it should also rejuvenate its video and audio features to stay afloat," emphasized Krishna Mukherjee, analyst with Telecoms Practice at CyberMedia Research, a market research and consulting firm.

The 10-year-old micro-blogging site Twitter currently has nearly 23 million users in India as part of its global 310-million base. Users have been able to tweet and create hashtags in Indian languages since February. Twitter "looks forward to the day when Twitter trends are dominated by Indian languages," the company posted on its official blog.