Twitter Expands Advertising Products to Indonesia

Twitter launched its advertising products in Indonesia on Wednesday, having announced a partnership with Komli Media to deliver Twitter ads to Southeast Asia back in November last year. The ad products which comprise of promoted tweets, promoted trends, and promoted accounts, will now be available to Indonesian companies wishing to increase exposure and brand participation among the highly active and engaging consumers on Twitter.

The promoted products are delivered through Twitter's own channels which the company has been working hard to optimize to accommodate its monetization strategy. These include the main website, the mobile website, Twitter owned TweetDeck, and Twitter's own mobile apps as well as a select number of third party apps including HootSuite.

In announcing the products' availability, Indonesia's largest mobile carrier Telkomsel was revealed to be the inaugural Indonesian client which will be delivering advertising through Twitter. While Telkomsel has been very active in engaging influential individuals on Twitter to help promote its mobile products over the last couple of years, it wants to gauge the effectiveness of Twitter's native advertising feature.

Twitter's vice president of International revenue Sailesh Rao spoke at the launch. He said that Southeast Asia had been one of Twitter's fastest growing regions and Indonesians are among the top five most active Twitter users in the world, which is why the company decided to expand its advertising efforts in the country.

Matt Sutton, senior director at Komli Southeast Asia said that Indonesia is the fastest in adopting and expanding digital marketing initiatives in the region with an estimated value of $60 million out of $300 million projected for the region with 40% growth year on year.

Telkomsel's head of digital, Kemas M. Fadhli admitted to DailySocial that it's taken Twitter quite a while to get to Indonesia despite the significant Twitter activity in the last few years. He expected Twitter to enter the market much earlier since the promoted products had been launched back in 2010.

In the meantime, hiring influential people on Twitter had become a staple in the company's digital promotion efforts. When asked if the official advertising channel on Twitter will affect Telkomsel's relationship with influencers or buzz agents, Fadhli said that there will be some adjustments but he sees the two methods as having different objectives.

According to Fadhli, Twitter's promoted products do not create the kinds of conversations that can be generated through buzz agents. The ads are designed to inform and create awareness to those who are already interested in the kinds of products that Telkomsel offers whereas buzz agents can create conversations, deliver feedbacks, and spread the information and promotions in a more organic way.

The personal endorsement factor through buzz agents is something that ads generally do not have but Telkomsel is certainly open to the opportunities that native Twitter ads may bring to the table.