Twitter acquired Indian startup Zipdial earlier today, signaling that the social network is doubling down on the fast changing Indian market. But the ramifications of the buy-out don’t stop there.
What Zipdial does is give companies a way to engage with people without forcing consumers to make calls, send SMS, or go online. All people have to do is send a missed call to a specific number belonging to a brand or service, and that subscribes the individual to relevant updates. It’s a little bit like Twitter, except it works mostly offline.
And now that Twitter owns Zipdial, that way of operating will be used by the social network in India and a lot more countries. “It can drive growth in other similar emerging markets, like Indonesia or Brazil,” says Rishi Jaitly, Twitter’s market director for India and Southeast Asia. While there are no specific plans yet, Jaitly explains to Tech in Asia that Zipdial has experience across Southeast Asia and Africa, so the know-how is ready to roll.
Thrilled to announce @zipdial is joining the flock! https://t.co/5qwLxWar1T Ambition: Make @twitter even more accessible in emerging markets
— Valerie R. Wagoner (@valwagoner) January 20, 2015
.@valwagoner, you’ve been an amazing partner for two years. Pinching myself that we now share a mission. Welcome to Twitter!
— Rishi Jaitly (@rsjaitly) January 20, 2015
Twitter has 284 million monthly active users in its latest data for Q3 2014, but the company is under pressure because growth has slowed. The solution to the slowdown might be to emulate what Facebook is doing and pay more attention to developing nations, which means making the social network more accessible to people without smartphones, or who use very little mobile data each month.
No internet required
“Twitter’s primary objective in India and emerging markets is growth,” says Jaitly. For Twitter, “2014 was a breakout year,” he says, as Twitter competed with Facebook to play an important role in the debates around India’s general election. “Today’s announcement is a testament to how fast we’re growing in the past couple of years,” Jaitly says with reference to the country.
What Zipdial offers Twitter, says Jaitly, is a way for people to “connect to digital content offline.”
That offline aspect is important, says Zipdial co-founder and CEO Valerie Wagoner, because “even though smartphone penetration in India is growing, only one-third use mobile data.” On top of that, India’s phone users, who are mostly on prepaid plans, consume surprisingly little mobile data – an average 60 MB of data per month, which is only 4.5 percent of the 1.38 GB consumed each month by subscribers in the US. That’s why Zipdial made use of the missed call phenomenon in the first place – because the way friends and families used missed calls highlighted a massive problem that people were fixing in a clever, ad-hoc way.
Zipdial co-founder and CEO Valerie Wagoner.
“We can apply Zipdial’s platform to Twitter’s amazing content,” says Wagoner, though she is also keeping future features under wraps. Wagoner sees the two companies as very alike, despite their different beginnings. “The purpose we serve is very similar to the Twitter proposition,” she adds.
See: Asia once again central to Facebook growth as region reaches 426 million monthly active users
Big moves
Twitter and Zipdial have co-operated in India in the past couple of years, which is what brought the two firms closer together.
Jaitly says those early experiments in conjunction with Zipdial worked well. Those allowed India’s phone users to make a missed call to follow certain celebrities on Twitter. This worked entirely offline, by receiving SMS updates, and didn’t require the individual to sign up to Twitter. “All kinds of people on all kinds of devices consumed content” through those projects, says Jaitly.
“You can expect us to draw lessons from experiments with Zipdial and scale them up,” he adds.
The acquisition – Twitter’s first in India, and which gives it a Bangalore office – leaves Twitter with a lot moves it can make in emerging markets, which also opens up new revenues streams from brands and media using this “missed call” service to engage with consumers. This is something to watch out for in 2015.
As for Wagoner and the Zipdial team, the buy-out marks a major milestone and success for India’s fast-growing startup ecosystem, showing that the country’s startups can make innovative products that have uses around the world. “Everything we’ve built will live on,” enthuses Wagoner. “It’s a lot of exciting potential.”
This post Twitter’s acquisition of Zipdial means it’s going after more users in emerging nations appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Twitter’s acquisition of Zipdial means it’s going after more users in emerging nations
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