Twitter popularity expanding in India
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 21 October 2009, 22:09 IST
Printer Print Email Email
Bangalore: With the help of search engine marketing firm Pinstorm, the private banks are monitoring around 1,600 tweets or conversations in a single day. If a customer faces and problem or wants to give feedback then he can just tweet to the bank. "Even simple things like not having enough cash in an ATM get reported in tweets. It is extremely important to react at the earliest to such problems and the tweets give the bank ample opportunity to take quick action, remedy the situation, and preserve their brand image in the bargain," explains Mahesh Murthy, Founder and CEO, Pinstorm to Business Standard. It is not just bank who are taking benefit of users. Many companies and organizations now use Twitter to stay in touch with their customer to take their feedback. In India twitter has been rapidly gaining in popularity. In fact, India, has an estimated 1.4 million twitters (Facebook would have around 8 million users while Orkut around 16 million users) and is the third-largest "tweeting" country after Germany and the U.S. How helpful a twitted can be came in to light during the Mumbai terrorist attack, when eyewitnesses sent an estimated 80 tweets every five seconds. Twitter users on the ground helped compile a list of the dead and injured. In less than three years the "tweet", or humble SMS of the internet as it's known, has crossed the five-billion mark globally. It's a free social networking and micro-blogging service that asks a simple question "What are you doing?" The answers (or tweets) are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users (via mobiles too) who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Hillary Clinton's recent visit to India was covered widely on Twitter. The Americagov Twitter feed was following the secretary every step of the way during her visits to Mumbai and New Delhi. Tweets have been helping businesses too. IT majors like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys Technologies are on twitter. And so are politicians like the Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor has nearly 3,50,000 followers (the highest in India). Many movie stars like Priyanka Chopra has huge twitter following as well. Twitter is expected to grow further in India, especially after the deal between Airtel and Twitter to send tweets through messages. Critics have also called it "pointless babble" but Murthy counters: "It's as useful or useless as a conversation can get. In fact, it's the pulse of the people which you can choose to acknowledge or ignore."

siliconindia