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S-based social networking giant Twitter Inc., which runs the micro-blogging site Twitter, will establish an office in Jakarta in the next three to six months. During a recent trip to Indonesia, Twitter'€™s president of global revenue and partnership, Adam Bain, spoke to The Jakarta Post'€™s Khoirul Amin about his company'€™s strategy for establishing a big presence in the country. Below are excerpts from the interview:

Question: What was Twitter'€™s main motivation for setting up an office in Indonesia?

Answer: This [setting up an office] is an important step for Twitter because Indonesia loves Twitter and Twitter loves Indonesia. In fact, when we think about the market overall, Indonesia is one of the most active countries on Twitter. When you step back and think about the entire region, the Asia-Pacific region is the largest and fastest growing across all of Twitter.

There have also been great moments that have happened here that are relevant and that people across the world talk about, too. Certainly, the [presidential] election was a great example, where there were millions of tweets about the election coverage, or during the holy month of Ramadhan, [where there were] some 45 million tweets about Ramadhan.

So, we are really excited, because there is terrific engagement by consumers using Twitter and we are opening an office to help spread that and then also to help brands and businesses become active in a terrific way on the platform.

The business, overall, is only a couple of years old. I started about four years ago to open up all of the business arms of Twitter. We just started opening international offices, global offices, over the last 12 to 18 months. And I think now, based on the election result, we really view this market as a terrific place to do business and so [we are] really excited to get here and build a big presence.

How much will Twitter invest to develop business in Indonesia?

We imagine a cross-section of employees here. In any business office, we have people that work with brands in a number of ways; be it with research, strategy, or account management to help support brand activities. We also think there is a huge opportunity to work with celebrities '€” certainly politicians, actors, musicians and so on who use the platform, to help bring the same level of strategy, or even improve how they tweet.

How big is Indonesia'€™s market or contribution to Twitter'€™s overall business?

We do not break down Indonesia'€™s revenue, but what I can tell you is that there are great brand stories that are coming out of Indonesia that I think is certainly great for Indonesia and great for the Asia-Pacific region, but are also great case studies for the rest of the world.

Coca-Cola, for example, recently ran a campaign using a new product that we launched on the beta. Its called '€œpromoted video'€ and it allows advertisers to bring their video right onto Twitter timelines and then play them back with just one touch on a mobile device ['€¦].

Coca-Cola saw that and they tested it and they ran it during Ramadhan. The campaign, the video, was a beautiful story about how neighbors were connecting with their family and the last part of the campaign was a call to action for people on Twitter to thank their family during Ramadhan. It received incredible engagement. So it really is a great example of using the video product but also using Twitter for what its great for, which is connecting with the world and also staying relevant in that way.

There is another great example here in Indonesia that we think is useful [...] something that Intel has been doing, called '€˜Tanya Intel'€™ [Ask Intel]. This really capitalizes on the idea that people are using Twitter to talk about a variety of different topics, and something we in particular in Indonesia is how connected people are to Indonesia, so this is one of the ways to connect to the technology community.

So, what '€˜Tanya Intel'€™ does is consumers can ask any technology question and Intel has committed to giving an answer in a pretty fast way. It is open pretty much constantly, any day of the week. What we
have seen is that consumers were interested in and passionate about technology can get an answer now provided by Intel. And we think that type of rapid response, or consumer delight, is really useful for other brands to learn globally across the world.

Will you partner with local companies here in Indonesia and what kind of partnership or collaboration will you aim for?

[...] We have started developing deeper partnerships with wireless and telecommunication providers so that we can bring Twitter even closer to consumers. We can see this in various ways. One is through a short message service (SMS) partnership that allows a company using Twitter to reach consumers through SMS. The way it works is consumers can just text the word '€˜follow'€™ to a specific phone number [in this case 444]. If they [consumers] do that, their message will come up as a tweet.

This is a great way to get Twitter content outside the Twitter application.