Twitter to open UK office to serve commercial needs

By Mark Banham, mediaweek.co.uk, Monday, 18 April 2011 11:28AM

Social media site Twitter is to launch a UK office to service the growing demand for advertising on the US-based site.

Twitter: to set up a UK office in London

Recruitment advertising for posts in the UK office, understood to be considered for an East London location, has already started, with vacancies for a sales account manager, sales executive, business development mobile/electronics and communications manager, all posted on the Twitter recruitment feed.

The launch of a London office for the micro-blogging site has been rumoured for some time, but never officially confirmed by the site’s founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone.

Twitter is now considering the creation of Facebook-style branded pages in a drive to increase its revenue from advertising.

Branded pages, through which advertisers could deliver tailored messages, are under consideration.

The social network is also to offer geo-targeted promoted tweets and a dashboard allowing advertisers to access data about their followers.

Twitter has 200 million active global users, generating 65 million tweets a day, and handles more than 800,000 search queries each day. Its users include many Hollywood stars, including bad-boy actor Charlie Sheen and pop star Britney Spears, as well as UK-based stars Stephen Fry and Lilly Allen.

The opening of a UK Twitter office will follow the land grab from Facebook, which opened the doors of its UK office at the end of 2007, an office that was led by the then UK sales director Blake Chandlee, who defected from internet giant Yahoo.

Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley has also indicated that the location-based social network will open a UK-based office at some point during 2012.

This article was first published on mediaweek.co.uk