Twitter On Saturday announced plans to star selling advertising services in the Middle East and North Africa. The company made its decision after its user base tripled in those regions over the last 12 months.
The micro-blogging service will work with Cairo-based marketing agency Connect Ads to sell its various advertising products throughout the regions.
Connect Ads will sell promoted tweets, promoted accounts and promoted trends for the service. All three of those ad types were originally only available in the US, UK, Japan and Latin America.
At a press conference Twitter vice president of international operations Shailesh Rao sai that “when we decided we wanted to prioritize in the Middle East region it was principally because we had a large user base here and was growing rapidly. The active user base in the Middle East has tripled in the last year. It’s one of the fastest growing regions in the world.”
Launching in the Middle-East and North African regions is an important step for Twitter as a new Arab Media Outlook report, prepared by Deloitte and the Dubai Press Club in 2012, found that digital advertising accounting for 4% of ad spends in 2011 and is expected to grow at an annual rate of 35% to $580 million by 2015.
With Twitter now valued at $9 billion the move to expand its ad offerings could be a sign of a coming-IPO, although Twitter officials have not hinted at such a public move.
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