Twitter needs to move to Asia: compete for the world's largest mobile ad market

Lead: The CNNMoney Web site in Tuesday published a commentary on Twitter's need to develop an Asian strategy (Twitter needs an Asian strategy), saying that since Asia is already the world's largest mobile advertising market, So Twitter must not ignore the region. But Sina Weibo and Tencent Micro-letters have become the company's biggest obstacle to developing Asian markets. The following is the full text of the article: Twitter is now a public company, so investors want to know when it will be profitable. Wall Street will also pay close attention to its mobile strategy. All social media companies should focus on mobile platforms. Fortunately, Twitter started well: 75% of the company's users came from mobile platforms, and mobile ads contributed 55% of the revenue. Twitter also announced in September this year that it had spent $350 million to buy mobile ad mopub, a sign that the company had realised it had to expand further in the mobile sector. But Twitter also faces another tricky problem: its tentacles in the Asian market are too narrow. The Asia-Pacific region, the world's largest mobile advertising market, is expected to reach $4.8 billion trillion this year, according to the latest data from market research firm Gartner. North America ranked second, with mobile advertising earning about $3.8 billion this year. So for Twitter to fully realize its potential, it must penetrate Asia as soon as possible. Only a small percentage of Twitter users are from the Asia-Pacific region. Twitter's current global mobile advertising market share is about 2%, far below Facebook's 16% and Google's 53%. This is no good for Twitter. But if the company can successfully expand the number of users in Asia, it is likely to significantly increase the global market share of mobile advertising. Who's in the way of Twitter? Sina Weibo and Tencent Micro-letters are the two biggest hurdles. Sina Weibo has successfully captured China's market share. The company's third-quarter net profit grew nearly twice times year-on-year, with revenue growing 21%. With Alibaba's strategic cooperation, micro-blogging users can directly use Alipay to shop on Weibo, thus providing Sina Weibo with further development momentum. In fact, Twitter may also want to use a similar model to make a profit. On the other hand, micro-letters have grabbed a broader market outside China, attracting many users in India, Malaysia and Thailand. Tencent uses micro-letters to boost revenue for the Chinese market, for example, Xun's "double 11" sales amounted to HK $637 million ($ 82 million trillion). So if Twitter wants to attract more users in Asia, it must understand the differences between us and Asian users, especially with Chinese users. It should perhaps also draw on the commercialization strategy of microblogs and micro-letters. Of course, if Twitter can find a way to make a profit through existing users, it will certainly help. But moving into the world's largest mobile advertising market must be Twitter's longThe key to the success of the period. (Ding Macro)