Twitter looks to Japan for research revenue growth

TOKYO >> Twitter has its eyes on Japan, with its 35 million users, to make money from companies eager to use Twitter data to research retail trends, manage inventory and improve customer service.

Although tweets are public, the San Francisco- based social media company offers special technologies for better analyzing them, taking into account all tweets, including those in archives, through partner companies such as NTT Data and NetBase, which pay Twitter.

Randy Almond, Twitter’s head of data business marketing, told reporters Thursday the partners in turn get paid by companies hoping to improve their businesses using information from Twitter data. Twitter rarely gets paid directly by the brands. Examples include monitoring consumer reactions to a new product, the demographics of users or complaints about what’s not in stock at a store.

Twitter says it deals properly with people’s privacy concerns, and the strength of Twitter is that the information is immediate, and all public, unlike private messages or email.

The number of Twitter users in Japan has grown fivefold since 2011. Japanese was the first language Twitter was offered in after English, and Japanese is the most frequently used non-English language.