India One of the Fastest Growing Markets For Twitter

With more and more people engaging with the micro-blogging website, US-based Twitter is finding India to be one of its fastest growing markets, a top company official said in New Delhi on Saturday.

"India is a big market for us. It is one of our fastest growing markets and we will be investing more here," Katie Jacobs Stanton, Vice President, Global Media, Twitter said. She was speaking at the HT Leadership Summit.

Stanton said 78 percent of the Twitter traffic now comes from outside the US, which signifies the growing importance of emerging markets.

"India is a growing market, which can be ascertained by the fact that the Lok Sabha elections generated about 60 million tweets," she said.

According to a recent report, Internet in India 2014, jointly published by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International, the number of Internet users in India would reach 302 million by December 2014, registering a year-on-year growth of 32 percent over last year.

"In October 2014, there were 278 million Internet users in India. Currently, India has the third largest Internet users' base in the world but it is estimated that by December 2014, India will overtake the US as the second largest Internet users' base in the world," the study said.

China currently leads with more than 600 million Internet users while the US currently has an estimated 279 million Internet users.

While discussing whether social media is eating up the share of big media, Stanton said: "We are not here to put media out of business. In fact, journalists were the first users of the medium to break and consume news."