Twitter popularity growing in Oman

Twitter is growing in popularity in Oman and across the Arab speaking world, according to the social media giant, which dubbed the Middle East as one of the fastest growing regions in the world.

The Arabic language and growing demand has acted as a catalyst to accelerate Twitter’s growth in Oman and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) over the past years. 

Dubbed as one of the fastest growing regions for the social media platform, the GCC has seen a constant growth since Twitter opened its offices in Dubai in 2015.

“MENA (Middle East and North Africa region) is one of the fastest growing regions for Twitter worldwide today. Arabic is a key language on the platform and in the region,” Benjamin Ampen, head of Revenue, Twitter MENA, said.

“The Gulf region and Saudi Arabia in particular, represent some of the largest group of active internet users. Since opening our office in Dubai in 2015, we are seeing consistent sales growth across the Middle East and this has continued in 2017.”

Twitter recently announced its financial results for the second quarter of 2017, which showed a 12 per cent year-on-year increase in daily active usage. This was the consecutive third quarter where the company witnessed double-digit growth. It posted $547 million in second quarter revenue.

Twitter remains focused on driving value across three key areas of service; audience, content, and revenue. It aims to focus on specific areas globally and in MENA to make it easier for people to get what matters to them and help them capture and share what’s happening more quickly.

“In MENA, we launched the additional Arabic ‘Moments’ guide earlier this year across the United Arab Emirates, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The ‘Moments’ guide appears as a new section within Twitter’s new Explore tab, which displays curated moments in Arabic that are categorised into a variety of topics from sports to entertainment,” Ampen stated.

To attract more audiences, the 2017 Arab Championship was being live streamed in its entirety and free of charge for a global audience on Twitter. This is the first live streaming deal for football on Twitter with a partner in the MENA region, in addition to the first live stream of a global football tournament on Twitter. The tournament started on July 21, 2017 and the final will take place on August 5.

Twitter has also extended premium content partners across Middle East to provide entertainment diversity to audiences.

“This partnership programme allows media partners and brands to team up to deliver premium content to fans on Twitter. The partnership allows a targeted audience, who are not necessarily following a publisher on Twitter, to view video highlights of premium content through promoted tweets directly on their Twitter feeds. These tweets contain pre-roll advertisements in the form of video clips from brands, which automatically appear prior to the publisher’s videos,” he said.

Globally, the company remains focused on improving revenue by enhancing the performance and measurement of revenue products, tapping into new channels of demand and new ways to buy ads on Twitter, and continuing to grow high-margin data revenue with a new product and channel segmented go-to-market approach.

Twitter is one of the major social media platforms to promote thoughts, ideas and products while also being the most reliable source of information for Omanis.

“There is a plenty of information available on Twitter. Whenever I need to find if information is true or not, I go to Twitter and nearly always the information there is reliable. I believe its growth can be attributed to the fact that it is now trending, unlike when it started here in 2011. If you ask someone and they tell you they don’t have a Twitter account, it’s kind of weird,” Ward Moosa Al Salti, a social media influencer in Oman, said.