Setting Sail season 2 Ep.2 | Twitter India MD Manish Maheshwari explains how India is one of the fastest growing audience market globally

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You can also read the transcript of the interview below:

Priyanka Sahay: Hello and welcome to Moneycontrol. This is Priyanka Sahay, special correspondent and you are tuned into Setting Sail, our weekly podcast that dives through the changing landscape of the tech world and the challenges within.

Social media has come of age in India. With affordable internet access, it has reached to the hinterlands of the country. With over 680 active internet users, the number of people on social media is only increasing every passing day. The medium has helped the population not just with entertainment, but has made a huge impact on the way businesses were done in the country.

To discuss the same and many more aspects today I have with me Manish Maheshwari, Managing Director of microblogging site Twitter, India.

Hi Manish thank you so much for joining us.

Manish Maheshwari: Thanks, Priyanka. Thanks for having me on your show.

Priyanka Sahay: So Manish, you've now spent a year in Twitter. How has your experience been here?

Manish Maheshwari: So indeed, I joined Twitter a year back. But I think my relationship with Twitter goes way longer than that. I signed up for Twitter more than 10 years ago, when I was in the Bay Area. I still remember the month, it was January of 2009. And over the last 10 years as an individual on the service, one thing that has really impressed me about Twitter is that it gives voice to individual and communities.

You can be anyone and you can be on Twitter, and you can have a voice. You can stay updated. You can connect with anyone and have a public conversation. And I think that is something that has really impressed me. And last year, when I became part of Twitter, India, one of the things that came to my attention was, there was a study conducted in 2017 when Twitter went ahead and asked some of its most passionate account holders, what is it that they like about the service?

And you know what Priyanka, what they say? Can you make a guess?

Priyanka Sahay: I wouldn't actually.

Manish Maheshwari: So what they said was this is a service where they get to hear and get exposed to all sides of a conversation, unique perspective. And that allows them to develop a much better understanding of the world around them and connect with what's happening. That is something which I have been experiencing. And I think it also came out to be true for most of our passionate users.

And it has been quite an experience for me in the last one year here. I joined Twitter, India in April, right when the Lok Sabha elections were going on. And the whole platform came live. I mean, this was a time when we had more than 396 million conversations, just around Lok Sabha elections, which was 600% growth over similar conversations five years ago in the previous elections in 2014.

And as soon as we got over with the local elections, we had the IPL and then of course, the Cricket World Cup. And the entire platform came alive with the entire fan community engaging with sports people and cricketers, and commentators commenting on match performance. In fact, the India-Pakistan match I still remember, that was the match when we had one of the highest number of tweets in a single day for a cricket match, it was about 2.9 million tweets in a single day.

So think about it. I mean, amazing experience the last one year. And most recent time, as we see the pandemic unfolding, it's unfortunate. And our service has never been more important. And the work that we do has never been in more demand to serve the public conversation, enable people to stay connected, raise awareness about the right of issues, engage in conversation and stay connected to the Twitter committees.

So really feel fortunate and also quite grateful to the team here, which has focused on the right thing, stayed resilient, and has been doing an amazing job in serving the public conversation on the service.

Priyanka Sahay: Twitter for all we know is a platform which is still is seen as a platform for the influential class maybe if I could say the ‘educated class’. Unlike many of the social media platforms such as Facebook or your recent competitor, TikTok, which has created a large space for itself among the masses.

Now will Twitter want to continue with its existing image in India or there are plans to modify this existing image?

Manish Maheshwari: So Priyanka let me emphasize this. And I mentioned this before as well. So let me reiterate.  Twitter is about what's happening in real time. It's your, it is mine, it's everyone's life connection to the world, and how events unfold. And this is especially true in the current times when we are seeing more and more audiences turning to Twitter, to understand and make sense of what's happening around them. Also, stay informed, stay connected and stay entertained. And they are seeking a sense of normalcy and this is what they are getting by coming to this service.

So we are seeing unprecedented usage across all audience segments, and tremendous growth in our audience. And if you look at the numbers, we don't disclose numbers by country but at a global level just in the last quarter, we had a 24% increase in our monetizable daily active users 266 million, which was a highest growth year on year ever recorded.

And coming to a specific point, I mean if you think about it how it is being utilized as a public service. So three things, I think people are leveraging it to stay updated and how is that happening. So we have worked with several health authorities and government bodies to get authoritative information on the platform. We have a dedicated search prompt. So when you search for an information you get information which is from authoritative sources first. So which enables people to stay fully updated and informed with the right information.

The second thing is about connecting. And let me give you some examples of how people are connecting on the platform. Between the lockdown what we saw that there was no on field sports happening. So every sports person was on the platform, running various virtual engagements. And fan battle like example would be IPL, only IPL kind of activities where cricketers and also broadly other sports people, including people like Harmanpreet Kaur, Rani Rampal, Sunil Chhetri engaging with their fan base and building that connection.

The same connection we also saw in the entertainment industry where industry stalwarts like Shahrukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit Nene, even major stars from our South Indian film industry, such as Mahesh Babu, Rajinikanth, they join the conversation encouraging people to stay safe. So that's the area where we are showing a lot of progress in terms of enabling people to stay connected, and also entertain at the same time with everyone joining.

And if you think broadly, right, I mean if you think broadly about what's happening in the world around us, it's also a great public service where people are leveraging this to solve for real challenges. There's an example of a 12-year-old boy who was separated from the family had to take shelter in a park. And it was because of Twitter and someone tweeting about it that this boy was united with the family. Another example I can quote here there's an account called Farmers Harvest Network, and through this distressed farmers who had perishable produce, were able to connect with relevant buyers all the way from mangoes to mushrooms, and held themselves.

And the third example I can give you in that area would be, it's also a platform where people can create movements. So when a couple of students were stranded, we had this hashtag called helpkotastudents through which they were able to connect with authorities and ensure safe passage. So you can see these are real life examples of how people at large across the country are leveraging your service to help themselves and seek solutions to the everyday problems they are facing.

Priyanka Sahay: Right. So if you're saying that, can we have a sense of what is the vernacular presence of Twitter in India? The company is learned to be having over 30 million users in India. And if we could have some vision as to how many of these are non-English speaking users, and what are the profiles of these users?

Manish Maheshwari: Yeah, so let me emphasize at a country level, we don't disclose our audience numbers, but overall our growth has been unprecedented. And I think in that sense, the growth in vernacular users has also been very strong. In fact, I can quote a few numbers to you. So, already on the service, we are seeing that more than 50% of the tweets in India are in non-English. So, immediately after English we have Hindi as a prominent language immediately followed by Tamil and Telugu.

And we are seeing that grow tremendously fast both because of the product improvements we are doing, but also increasingly because the kind of content that is coming on the platform both because of our efforts on the onboarding publishers, but also original content is getting created. And on the other side on the consumption side, there is significantly better discovery, we recently launched a product improvement called Preferred Language Selector.

So, the insight there was that in India, most of the phones have a default language as English and that is taken as a signal to decide what tweets to show. And we already know that more than 50% of tweets in India are not in English. So we gave people a choice to choose their preferred language. And we took that as a signal to decide, among many other signals what to expose. And we saw tremendous growth in the stickiness and engagement of the audience.

People who saw tweets in their native language were four times more likely to stay on the service. In fact, you would also know last year, immediately after I joined we also made investment in ShareChat, a prominent player in the vernacular space. And we believe strongly in the fact that a lot more growth and potential exists in that segment. And we are excited about what that relationship and partnership can do for us.

Priyanka Sahay: Interesting. And coming a little on the business side of it. Now that you're saying that vernacular is all growing in the country, the company still charges a premium for its ad slots as compared to any of the competitors that you have in India. Now, will you be able to drive volume in a price-sensitive market that India is with this strategy? Or there is some tweaking which is in the pipeline?

Manish Maheshwari: So Priyanka, let me start by giving you a bit of a context and understanding about how we think about advertising and helping brands connect with their audience on this service. So, first of all, this is a service on which for any brand, their most valuable audience are available, and they are available at a time and they are most receptive. So, when you are an audience on the platform, you are there to actively seek information, seek connection or stay entertained. So, you have a very leaned kind of an attitude.

And at the same time the audience is such which is sort of the popular voice, people who are leaders, who are opinion makers, people who are looked up by other people in the community at large. So Twitter allows brands to connect with their most valuable audience when they are most receptive. And when we think about helping brands do that we look at it in terms of engagement, and not necessarily in terms of impressions. So when we say engagement, we look at what are they really doing, what the brand intend them to do. For example the brand has a story to tell through a video, are they watching that video, or this brand has a specific call to action, are they taking that call to action?

And that's how we solve for those brand needs. What we do is that we work with the brands, understand their narrative, the message, and what kind of budget they have and what audience they want to reach. And we work with their team, give them advice about the right kind of amplification approach on this service. There are two things we do really well and that is where our true superpower comes to the fore. One is to learn something new. And the second thing is to connect with what's happening.

Let me give you a few examples of how that happens. So this is the platform where news breaks. This is a platform where people learn about something new. So this is an ideal platform for any brand to launch a new product, a new feature, or even a new message. And if they get their launch, right, and they land a narrative, right? It has a multiplier impact on everything else they do, because this narrative then carries on to things outside Twitter as well.

They get a much favorable coverage in the traditional news media. Plus, they get to work with their most leaned-in, and most I would say, forward looking and progressive audience. And that has tremendous success in terms of overall success of the launch so that's on the launching something new.

I also talked about connecting with what's happening. So because this is a service where events are unfolding, movements take place and major things happening around us are driven by the trends that originate from Twitter. It's also an ideal place for brands to leverage the equity of those events, connect with what is happening, and therefore become the front and center of those conversations and derive the right benefit for their brand brands.

For example on Friendship Day, Amazon Prime would work with us. And recently they had a very good relationship working with us on 'Shots of Friendship', primarily helping all their audience to connect virtually talk about interesting stories about their friendship, and also reminisce about great relationship. And everything happened virtually in the form of coffee book, which essentially a set of tweets that people had done on the service through a hashtag called ShotsOfFriendship.

So these are the examples of how brands can leverage those interesting events and occasions to connect and drive a disproportionate impact. Also we launch something called a Promoted Trend Spotlight recently, which combines the impactful usage of a video as a creative asset with the premium placement of that video in the Explore tab. So whenever anyone logs into Twitter and opens the Explore tab, they see that conversation through the Promoted Trend Spotlight, which has a significantly disproportionately positive impact in creating awareness for the brand and also a unique way for them to tell their story in a way that people are most receptive to listen to.

Priyanka Sahay: Now that you have given this 360 degree perspective, I would like to understand that in the last one year’s tenure, what has been the growth reported by India in terms of revenue. And what have been the drivers.

Manish Maheshwari: So again, I talked about it before and let me reiterate, I cannot disclose country-specific numbers. Having said that, because our audience growth has been amazing, in fact, India has been one of the fastest growing audience market for Twitter globally, that has an impact on everything else as well, because more audience and more conversation drives more engagement.

And ultimately, on the advertising side, the way we work with brands is to help them drive engagement. So that has a very positive impact on that side as well. At the same time, the other thing that has also been helping the whole industry is the movement to video. And video has seen tremendous growth, both from the creation side but also on the consumption side and more brands are now leveraging it, including in our case, if you look at it, most creative assets on the brand side and on the advertising side, leverage the power of video.

And video is far more engaged. They have a much better recall so all that is having a positive impact on the growth on the revenue side as well. Plus of course, we are also seeing a secular trend in industry to move marketing dollars to digital, away from print and other sources. And also more so we have seen that because of this digital industry has been growing at a significantly higher rate than print or even TV.

And because we operate in the digital space, we feel fortunate that we now have the opportunity to serve more and more brands and advisors in a much better way to help them tell their story in a way which is not just impactful, but also turns out to be more efficient and effective because that's where the audience is today. And I think there's a much better way of targeting them and make sure that every message is very relevant. And good ads served to the right audience at the right time is also good content. And that's what drives good engagement.

Priyanka Sahay: That's actually a very interesting point, Manish I must say is perhaps music to the ears of many of us who work in the digital platforms across the country right now.

And having said that I will come back on this specific question how brands are leveraging more from digital than the print as of now. But I also want to ask you that Twitter has been experimenting a lot with new launches, if I could call them product launch or vertical launches. Video, of course, you've rightly pointed out.

Fleet is also something which you very recently launched. Now, what is the rationale behind having something as a Fleet? And how is this going to help the brand?

Manish Maheshwari: Yeah. First of all, thanks for bringing that up. Fleets is a very recent thing. And we just launched last week. And personally, I'm very excited with this. So the thinking behind this is by adding other way of conversation, we will enable people to express themselves in new and interesting ways. And we will also enable them to do things that they would not have done. There are two things that distinguishes Fleet from tweeting. One is that whatever your Fleet disappears in 24 hours.

So it can be very light hearted and light touch way of expressing yourself. And the second one is you can avoid the public scrutiny because there is no like there is no retweet. And if you want to solicit any input that you want to get, it comes only from people that you actually follow. It comes in your DM.

So overall, that's an exciting part of it. And we are early in the game, we are still learning. So we'll have to wait for a few more weeks and see how this unfolds. But overall it also underscores the point that India is a really important market for Twitter. And that is why India was chosen among the first three countries to launch this globally. And that is another important aspect of the fact that India is seeing tremendous growth when it comes to our audience.

Just want to make one small correction. In the last question about Fleet, just keep in mind that this is a test what we are doing with Fleet. And India is one of the first three markets to get this thing tested. And as I mentioned, in my previous answer, there's a lot for us to learn. And depending on how it gets used by our audiences, this specific feature, will decide what shape and form it will take. So it's important for us to learn. And I think in that spirit, we launched this test in India as one of the first three markets.

Priyanka Sahay: That's very interesting. And the fact that Twitter is going ahead and saying that it is trying to ensure that as less public scrutiny can happen, it's as good. That’s actually a very good point that you raised Manish.

On the same lines, I would also like to ask you that Twitter has also been experimenting with something called Read The Articles Before Sharing. Now, while on the face of it, it looks very interesting and promising. I also have a concern as an end user. So I would like to ask you very categorically that what business is it of a medium.

In this case, I would say Twitter's to govern the actions of users. How is that relevant for the medium to decide? And Twitter at this point in time, will it make sense for the company to do something like that or there's a larger reason behind why you are doing what you're doing?

Manish Maheshwari: Yeah, no, it's a good question. And let me share some context and perspective on this. First of all, this is an experiment. So we want to learn. So we are experimenting with this. The thinking here is sometimes some articles with a sensational headline can become very viral very quickly, even when people have not read it and fully understood the context. And with that premise or hypothesis. The idea is to explore whether nudging people to read the article or telling them that they did not read it, would it let them be more thoughtful, and engage in healthy conversation?

So if you go back to what I said, we believe in serving the public conversation, and we won't be doing our job well, if that conversation is not healthy. And to ensure the health of the conversation, we need to make sure that the participation is thoughtful and is done with the right spirit. So it just allows us to ensure that we continue to fulfill our larger mission of serving the public conversation and have informed conversation on the platform.

Priyanka Sahay: All right. And coming back to a previous conversation wherein you were talking about how revenue is moving from print to digital now. Could you elaborate a little bit more on that as to what are advertisers looking at in the India market? And what sort of brands are these who are going for a digital first approach in India?

Manish Maheshwari: Yeah. So I'll tell you from what I have been witnessing firsthand, and it's a very good question. I would assume that you would know that as an industry, I mean, this change from advising to digital has been going on for a long time. What has pandemic done is that it has forced every company to think about it more critically and also accelerated digital transformation. It has impacted everyone. And it has impacted some more than the others and that we are seeing now.

In our case, what is happening is we are seeing that certain industries are at the forefront of this transformation. And they are utilizing the current situation in a way that where they can connect with their audience significantly better, so one example would be digital streaming. If you think about it, all the major show launches are now moving to digital, with all theaters being closed, including big name movies are now getting released on the OTT platforms.

And that is where our service comes alive. We work with those players to not only create the right kind of excitement before the launch, but at the time of launch, we ensure that they have the relevant digital footfall to watch their show, and then sustain that momentum after the show as well. So prior to the lockdown, we had a few examples, for example, where we worked with amazon prime video on a series called Family Man, which was a series, I think several months back. And there was a few of them happening a year back.

But in the last three months we have seen week after week, there has been several such launches. The most recent one being Paatal Lok where we worked very closely with the team. Then there was this four more a short series to where we again worked with a leading OTT player. And when I gave you the example of this hashtag ShotsOfFriendship, where people were encouraged to tweet about their friendship and this became ebook comprising of tweets, creating a very sense of community and positivity.

So one example is those kind of brand advertisers. Similarly, we are also seeing tremendous growth in e-learning and particularly when people are focusing a lot more on their personal growth and development. That's also an area where we see tremendous growth. Also, there's a growth in terms of Tech OEMs, people are upgrading their tech devices and with the supply chain sorting out in the last one month, I think that is also growing.

So I see that industry after industry, everyone is readjusting. And at a secular level, the whole move of advertising from print and TV to digital has accelerated. And it allows us better opportunity to help the brands connect with the audience in a way, which is more efficient and also more impactful.

Priyanka Sahay: Interesting. And on that note, I would also like to ask you that going forward, do you see the reverse happening at all once the things come back to the normal? I'm sure we are not anticipating that happening anytime soon. But once the vaccine comes in place, will the shift come back to how it used to be earlier?

Manish Maheshwari: So let me start by sharing with you how we think about it and what we are doing. And we can also talk about broader concepts as well. At Twitter, we don't see work from home as a short term reaction to the pandemic. And we see this as the future of work. And one needs to ask the question as to what is the right way to work? What is the right location, and the right modalities to engage, so that people are most productive, they are most creative and they also feel comfortable and safe?

And from that perspective, we look at it. So clearly, we have been leading the way when it comes to decentralized remote work. We were one of the first companies to declare work from home. And we were also the first companies to also give that choice in a indefinite way in the sense that people do this as long as they feel comfortable about it.

Now, if you think about it, most companies will be faced with that choice. Some companies are better placed to take advantage of the development and technology tools and other things to be more efficient with this change. Some companies will have to catch up. But overall, it's a big reset and a rethink for everyone.

And my point of advice, there would be everyone needs to critically evaluate what is an important piece of work, and what is the best place to get that executed on. And you know what many times the best way to do something is to not to come to office, but to do it in the comfort of your home in a way where you are very productive.

Having said that, it doesn't mean that everyone will have to work from home, our offices will open as soon as it is safe and reasonable to open. And people would have the choice to come back and work from office whenever they want, if that is what is required.

What is the sufficiency and what is the right aspect of doing it? The other bigger issue that it opens up is to also think about the fact that when you think about work from home for a longer duration when you are not engaging with your office colleagues in a physical setting. It also creates other challenges in terms of mental health, engagement and connection. So when we look at that, we take a very principled view on how to deal with that. And our view always has been it is people first, and lead with empathy and flexibility.

So when I say empathy and flexibility and people first I mean four things. So first is about choice. Second is about enablement. Third is about support. And the fourth is about connection. When we think about it, we say that we need to give people choice and let people decide how they want to work and where they want to work so that they can do their most creative work in the most efficient way.

The second one is enablement, which is how do we make sure that they are productive when they are working from home, which includes things like helping them set up a proper working environment. We have something called productivity allowance that people can use to get that done. The third is about support. So are they well supported? And support goes a long way, particularly in tough times like this. And we have a various business resource group or support groups that one can join and get help. We have something called Twitter Parents, for people with kids, we have Twitter Women. We also have Twitter Asians [ph] and so on and so forth.

And finally, it is important to stay connected and feel part of a bigger team. Otherwise, it's very easy to get into isolation and lose productivity. And that's where we have done some very interesting stuff. For example, we had something called storytime with staff. And the insight there was that we realized that parents are going through a lot of challenges at this point in time, and they also are juggling between work and they also have kids and schools are closed, childcare is closed.

And this is a global issue. So we started a weekly series where staff would tell stories. And the first one was done by Jack himself, our Founder and CEO, where he read two stories. In fact, one of the stories was a picture book that he created the age of four, and personally I was quite excited because I was listening to this along with my 10-year-old daughter. It was a great experience to have the Founder and CEO, talk about a story he wrote at the age of four that I could listen to, with my daughter at bedtime.

And that goes on to say how you can erase the physical boundaries, how you can bridge the gap that is there geographically and create the intimacy and that connection instantly by leveraging technology in this current time. So let me pause here. I think there are many examples I can give, for example, the other thing we do in the India office, we do a Happy Hour every Friday after 3pm.

All of us come online and we talk about things which are not work about what show we plan to watch that evening? What new developments happened in our personal life? What book are we reading? What are interesting stuff we have done? And that creates that virtual comradery which we think in the normal time we would do in our office, when we will hang around near the pantry. So interesting time but it requires us to think more critically and adapt ourselves as leaders to ensure that things stay on the right course.

Priyanka Sahay: Well, I must say that you're standing true to the essence of being a social media platform. And I hope that a lot of companies try and take lessons from all the activities that you're doing. It sounds really interesting to me.

And on that note, Manish I would like to about the recent development that Twitter has done internationally. So the company has hired former FBI attorney James Baker, who was involved in the investigation into the Trump campaign and its Russia links during the 2016 Presidential Election.

Now, I would like to ask from you as to what really led to this development and how are you expecting this to be helping Twitter, if you could throw some light on that?

Manish Maheshwari: So Priyanka, I think there are better people who can answer this question in better depth and detail, but the only thing I would like to say is, we are thrilled to welcome Jim Baker. And he is committed to our core principles of an open internet and freedom of expression. And he brings a wealth of experience navigating complex global issues with a principled approach. I think that's what I would like to say at this point in time.

Priyanka Sahay: All right, then. On that note Manish, I would really like to thank you for taking time out for us.

Manish Maheshwari: My pleasure, Priyanka. Thank you for having me on your show.

Priyanka Sahay: So that's all that we have for this episode of Setting Sail. Meanwhile, if you have any comments or queries you can write down to us. Our email is mcpodcast@w18.com. You can also follow us on Twitter with our user IDs at moneycontrolcom and @PriyankaSahay. Till then for more news, views and updates stay logged on to moneycontrol.com.