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Twitter stands strong in Indonesia despite low global ratings
Is Twitter really being abandoned? Are Indonesians drifting away from the social media they once adored?
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These days, users are more commonly using GIFs to express themselves on Twitter as the social media platform enables a larger GIF size upload, up to 15 MB. (Shutterstock/Khomkrit Phonsai)
T
he global number of Twitter users reached 313 million by mid-2016, a 3 percent increase from the previous year. Meanwhile, the social network landscape has become more crowded lately with increasing activity on Snapchat, Path and Instagram.
Although global statistics show Twitter is slowly being abandoned, Twitter Indonesia country head Roy Simangunsong thinks otherwise.
“Who says Twitter is being abandoned? Indonesian users are the most talkative in the world,” said Roy during the #RameDiTwitter event at Hook Cafe, Jakarta, on Tuesday. He further highlighted that so far this year there had been a total of 4.1 billion tweets compiled by Twitter Indonesia, saying that the figure did justice to the country’s moniker as a Twitter Nation.
Roy pointed out that the number of tweets per day posted by Indonesian users had shown a 10 percent surge since the holy month of Ramadan this year (June 4- July 5). He also mentioned that 76 percent of millennials in the nation were active Twitter users.
(Read also: Twitter cuts staff, kills off Vine app amid pressure to grow)
According to Roy, Twitter will never be abandoned because the microblogging service does not have competitors. He further claimed that Twitter’s future was bright as it had a well-established identity, adding, “Every incident that has happened in real-time can be found for the first time on Twitter.”
The former Okezone CEO regards different social media platforms as having their own specific roles and functions: Instagram is to share photos, Facebook is to stay updated with faraway friends, and Snapchat is to share video snapshots of one’s day-to-day life.
As a user of other social media platforms, Roy explained that certain types of content were more fitting to be posted via Twitter, and there were some more suitable to be seen on Instagram or Facebook.
He underlined that, “Every message conveyed will have a different resonance when posted through different platforms.” (mra/asw)
