Twitter to bridge govt-people gap via 'Samvad'

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, under pressure to articulate the company's strategy better to investors and battling a slowing user growth, tried his best to explain that there was a definitive India strategy. He was in Delhi on Tuesday. The company said its primary objective was to reach as many Indians as possible - and they need not necessarily have to be online. They could receive tweets, from select accounts as of now, through SMS.     

Costolo announced 'Twitter Samvad', a service that would help the government and government bodies communicate with people via tweets through the SMS medium. As of now there are 16 government partners, including the Prime Minister. Users need to give a missed call to a designated number (01130063006 for the PM) and they would start receiving a set of curated tweets throughout the day.   

Twitter christened it a 'digital governance service' but demonstrates the company's growing interest in India. That interest is two-fold. First, the company is benefitting from the country's start-up and engineering ecosystem - the Samvad service is based on ZipDial's platform, an Indian company acquired by Twitter recently.

Second and more importantly, is its user growth and business. The company does not disclose India users; it has more than  288 million monthly active users globally. But that implies a very small India number right now and thereby, a huge potential for growth.

Particularly, if it reaches out to mobile users who are offline. India has about 300 million Internet users currently but nearly a billion mobile phones. And India has shown good appetite to consumer social media through phones. A forecast from eMarketer in January this year said that Facebook's mobile phone audience in India will surpass 100 million in 2015, and by 2017, the country will have more mobile Facebook users than the US.

Costolo and his team realise this potential. The volume of mobile Internet users, he said, will accelerate in the country because of 4G and LTE. Perhaps India can help Twitter grow again - in the December quarter of 2014, the company's monthly active users grew just 1.4 per cent over the September quarter, the slowest thus far.

Nevertheless, the firm is seeing advertising interest.

"Our business has started to grow here in the last couple of quarters," Costolo told reporters during a press meet.

He named a few advertisers - Samsung, BMW, Mercedes - were among them. Advertisements will continue to be Twitter's primary revenue model, the CEO said. The company also licenses its data to businesses and universities for analysis.

Costolo will have to make many more trips to the sub continent.