Twitter may be blocked in mainland China, but there is still plenty of money to be made from beyond the Great Firewall. The company has opened a Hong Kong office with the goal of staying close to companies operating in China.
“Opening our Hong Kong office now and hiring a sales team to work directly with advertisers across the Greater China market will contribute to our next phase of growth in Asia,” Twitter’s vice president for Asia Pacific, Shailesh Rao, told the South China Morning Post.
The small office, which opened on Tuesday with just one employee, will target potential advertising clients among the country’s business community. Twitter generates most of its revenue from selling promoted tweets, accounts or topics to corporate clients.
TechCrunch said it contacted the company for more information on how it plans to achieve its objective.
“There are a number of these Chinese companies that are really aiming to be global now,” Peter Greenberger, who heads up the social media company’s emerging markets operations and is based in Singapore, told Financial Times.
He said, “The opportunity, we think, is huge. We know there’s demand. We’ve had some experience with Chinese companies already that are seeking to reach audiences overseas.”
Twitter hired its first full-time employee dedicated to managing its business in greater China in the run-up to its initial public offering at the end of 2013. The head of media partnerships has worked with celebrities and television networks to boost Twitter’s presence in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Twitter’s China strategy is similar to the approach taken by Facebook, which is also banned in China. Even if the government miraculously decided to unblock them, Twitter and Facebook would both face daunting competition from homegrown social networking services like WeChat and Sina Weibo.
In a talk at Tsinghua University last October, however, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said the company ‘is already in China” because its site gives companies an international marketing tool.
In other words, a social networking site doesn’t need users in China to make money there, as long as it has companies paying for advertising and or setting up marketing accounts.
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