Saudi Arabia key to Twitters event-centered gameplan

LONDON: When asked about what was most likely to disrupt his government’s agenda, one former UK prime minister is reported to have answered, “Events, dear boy, events!”

Such disruptive “events,” while awkward for governments the world over, are of course pretty essential for the world’s media, whether traditional or social.

This is particularly the case for Twitter, which experiences its highest surges of traffic coinciding with sporting events, breaking news, and “event” television such as “Game of Thrones.”

With that in mind, the micro-blogging service is planning to become more of an events-centric platform — with Saudi Arabia and Arabic-speaking countries playing a key part in the strategy.

“We have constant usage all the time, but you see these spikes in traffic when people surge on to the service when events are unfolding in real-time, for a World Cup game, an episode of a TV show, or during Ramadan here in the region,” Keith Coleman, Twitter’s global vice president for product, told Arab News.

“Twitter is great for these moments, but the customer experience is too hard right now,” he said.

“So we’ve been working on what we really see as a ... transformation of the service, we want to make it as easy to follow the events or interests you have as it is to follow people.”

Twitter’s move to boost its focus on events unsurprisingly coincides with perhaps the biggest sports tournament of them all — this year’s World Cup in Russia.

Individual pages — accessible via the Twitter app — enable fans to monitor matches in real-time, with live scores and video streaming, alongside curated content from Twitter’s existing “Moments”, and live updates from the twitterverse, with commentary from players, coaches and pundits taking pride of place.

“The events experiences are designed to be rooms where you can come in and talk to other people who are excited about this event and have thoughts on it.

It’s like being at a dinner table with everyone who shares the same interest,” says Coleman.

He compares the experience Twitter is aiming for as akin to “a 24/7 sports bar where you walk up and sit down and the players, coaches and commentators sit next to you, and you just have a conversation.”

The quality of that conversation is key though, as anyone who’s spent more than 10 minutes following events on Twitter will know only too well. Last month the company unveiled efforts to combat trolls and bots, requiring new users to submit their email addresses or phone numbers before signing up, and making users exhibiting suspicious behavior less visible on users’ timelines.

Improving the quality of the conversations on Twitter, and especially its new events experiences, is central to the company’s strategy of increasing user engagement, which can be used in turn to attract a higher spend from advertisers.

The strategy has begun to bear fruit for Twitter; the company has enjoyed two consecutive quarters of profitability thanks to rising users and higher advertising revenues.

Investment bank JPMorgan raised its target price for the service last month, betting that such advertising revenue will continue to climb.

Saudi Arabia is an important market for Twitter’s new events strategy, thanks to both the size of its user base and the country’s fondness for sports. The Kingdom is one of the company’s top 10 markets in terms of users, and still experiencing double-digit growth.

The enthusiasm for football among the Saudi population makes the country a natural target for the new World Cup event experiences; the Kingdom generated more tweets about the World Cup in the run-up to the tournament than any other market bar Japan.

“#YallaGoal,” an Arabic-language show launched by Twitter before the tournament, has attracted up to half a million viewers online per episode, the company noted.

Coleman also identified e-sports and gaming events as particularly likely to appeal to a Saudi audience.

“We really want to get to a place where we have (experience) for every event that matters in the world, every episode of every TV show, every game in every league in every sport, every significant news event in the world, any event from any niche hobby and so on,” he said.

“We’re starting with the World Cup, but we’re going to be building out from here to cover many of these things. We don’t have an exact timeline of what’s coming when, but that’s where we’ll be headed and I think there’ll be many events that are relevant to the region.”

Part of that strategy will involve personalized push notifications for events of interest to individual users, he said, giving no further details as to when such notifications would materialize.