Twitter is ramping up its hiring in India as it looks to create specific products for Indian users. The social media giant is looking to scale up its teams by hiring members in senior positions across product management, revenue science, design, research and data science verticals, reported The Economic Times.
India is the third-largest audience for Twitter in the world, with 23.6 million users on the platform as of January 2022. While the US and Japan still have a larger user base on the platform -- 76.9 million and 58 million, respectively -- India’s rapid increase in the number of smartphone users and cheap internet have catapulted it to become one of the largest potential markets for social media platforms.
"Today there are close to 6 million developers in India. Twitter too has strong aspirations for India, a priority market for us. We are constantly piloting new features and learning from people's experience on the service. We are available in 11 Indic languages. Infact, almost 50% of tweets in India are now in languages other than English,” said Apurva Dalal, Engineering Site Lead at Twitter India to ET.
The company is planning to develop global solutions for Android-forward markets like India while focusing on particular services that would interest users from India. The company recently announced that it will be launching a cricket tab with the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2022 season warming up.
“Starting this week, the service will be testing a Cricket Tab on its Explore page, rolling out the experiment to some people in India who use Twitter on Android,” the company said in a statement.
The company had also recently partnered with payment services provider Paytm to allow users to make payments for the platform’s Tips feature. Indian users are now able to use UPI, credit and debit cards, and netbanking along with other options for availing the feature.
"Earlier in January, we also started testing a revamped, more personalized explore page to make it easier for people to unwind, find new interests and see what’s happening. In February, we integrated Paytm as an additional payment provider for Twitter’s Tips feature. With the addition of Paytm as a payment provider, people will be able to make payments using UPI, credit and debit cards, and netbanking, among other options," said Shirish Andhare, Director and Head of Product at Twitter India.
Behind all these new features is a rapidly growing team. The company’s tech team has grown by 150 percent in 2021 from 2020, and the company doesn’t look like it will be hitting the brakes on hiring anytime soon.
"Our decentralized model has been core to this growth allowing anyone to work for Twitter from anywhere opening up more opportunities for people at a pan India level. The hires across verticals are a testimony of our commitment to grow our team in India and build a service that is made in India, for Indians. In India, we have teams across all three global engineering lines of business -- revenues/ads, consumer and core technology platform teams,” Dalal added to ET.
At the same time, Twitter’s user base in India has continued to grow. The company stated that monetisable daily active users (mDAU) grew by 74 per cent (year-on-year) in Q4 2020, and its growth in India is part of the process of achieving 315 million mDAU (monetisable daily active users) by Q4 2023 globally.
