In an exclusive interview with ET's Anumeha Chaturvedi, Rao, who was in India for Twitter Udaan - Twitter's first business leadership summit in Asia - spoke about how the Indian government is utilising the platform, the top Indian influencers on the site, new products and how Twitter is moving away from being a marketing to a mission-critical enterprise platform.
Edited excerpts:
How is India faring compared with the other emerging markets?
What we're excited to see is that APAC is the fastest growing region for the company in terms of users and revenue. Within APAC, India is the fastest growing market in Asia in terms of revenue and usage.
So we've had so much success here that we felt that it was the right time to build on that success by showing our commitment to bring together key leaders from across the Indian business community to talk about what we are seeing in terms of product innovation and general trends in digital and technology and be able to educate and share with this community how they can get more out of the platform.
It's our fastest growing market in our fastest growing region, so all eyes are on India.
How are Indian leaders and influencers faring on the platform?
Twitter is changing the way companies and individuals engage with their constituents. How CEOs engage with customers, investors, employees, suppliers and partners. In India, leaders understand that. This is a country with the savviest leaders in the world, and you have people like Anand Mahindra who say they can understand through Twitter what's going on on the factory floor.
We often talk about private sector leaders, but see what PM Modi has done using Twitter as a platform to elevate the image of India in the world. To clarify and make clear that India is a place to do business for foreign companies. Twitter is the platform for him to connect with global influencers.
The Prime Minister's Office has been extremely strategic and savvy in recognising that, and that's why they're so good on Twitter. Whether it's a conglomerate leader like Anand Mahindra, a government leader like Modi and his office, or startup and ecommerce founders like Sachin Bansal or Kunal Bahl, they're extraordinary on Twitter.
That's an indication of why India has been such a growth market for us. Even cricket personalities or actors like Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Padukone or Shah Rukh Khan, their presence is global. If you see our list of the top 100, 200 individuals, Indians are always disproportionately on them across fields.
The Indian government was the first to launch an emoji outside the US. It is one of the most progressive minded, forward looking institutions that we work with in the world and there is a lot that the private sector can learn from. That is why when the Indian delegation came to San Francisco, I told Jack Dorsey that you need to pay attention, you need to be there, and we had the who's who of the company, including our executive chairman Omid Kordestani, interacting with this delegation.
How is Twitter driving growth and how is the strategy changing?
Twitter has become a rich media platform, and video has become the central tool. Whether it's Periscope, Vine or Twitter itself, we have become the home of live videos. When something is happening in the world, people want to express their views about it using video on Twitter. So we really want to talk about videos as we are seeing the engagement rates on videos.
We are seeing how very quickly we're becoming a global video platform with a very unique twist. And we want to make sure that our key partners in the country understand how to take full advantage of that. Secondly, we really want to make sure that these partners also understand the insights they can draw form the data that's collected through twitter.
The insights that can help businesses evolve their product portfolios to help them make smart distribution choices.We have examples of companies that have reduced churn, discontinued core products, changed products to have better features that customers want.
We want to make sure that leaders in India understand how they can gain more insight out of their use. We are interested in broadening the base of the platform to include customer service. Twitter is more than just a marketing platform. It's a communication platform. We enable both the proactive and reactive communication and engagement with audience.
Proactive through marketing and reactive through customer service (customer service is a tool on Twitter that enables customers to reach out directly to companies though embedded links). Our first public implementation for customer service is with a brand like Apple. The evolution is moving from a marketing platform to a mission critical enterprise platform and we are very excited about that.
How are Indian advertisers and companies taking to these?
Reliance is one of our early customers for customer care here. Jet Airways has used it to engage customers around flight schedules. We did an integration with Kotak Bank. India has been at the forefront of using Twitter as a broadbased platform for all manner of communication, including customer service.
We launched First View in India last month which allows brands to be on top of the news feed. Tata Motors was the first to use it for one of their launches. The engagement rates that we are seeing with First View are unbelievable double-digit engagement rates. You don't see such numbers in marketing.
The other product we are very excited about is emojis. They sound simple and they are, but their consequences for the brands are dramatic. Vodafone is the first corporate brand to launch its own emoji here. Brands have the opportunity to be playful, creative and expressive with the audience.
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