Twitter partners SingTel for Southeast Asia's first promoted products campaign launch

By: Joash Wee

SingTel launches its first Twitter campaign today in partnership with the microblogging service.

Since announcing it’s exclusive partnership with Komli Media in Southeast Asia, Twitter has been engaging advertising clients  for its Promoted Products suite. Announcing the launch of its advertising offerings today, Twitter also announced that it is partnering SingTel as its first client in the region.

According to SingTel’s Director of Digital Market, Miguel Bernas, SingTel currently engages over 9,000 followers through its two Twitter accounts, @singtel and @singtelsupport. He shared at the exclusive media preview today about how SingTel had successfully promoted its 2NE1 surprise performance a couple of months back using just organic efforts on Twitter. He also mentioned that Twitter’s Promoted Products suite would have came in handy then, allowing SingTel to capitalise on the buzz and reach out to a larger audience of potential customers.

Twitter’s Vice President of International Revenue, Shailesh Rao, called their promoted products offering “Conversation as a canvas for marketing”. He shared about how brands can engage and target customers and potential customers with the “only conversational marketing platform and opportunity in the market”.

Drilling down into how these promoted products on Twitter works. Shailesh shared that there will be two categories – promoted tweets or accounts and promoted trends. Promoted tweets or accounts will be based on a bidding system, the price of which depends on the targeting perimeters that advertisers select and also the market demand.

Promoted trends will be made available to advertisers at a fixed price, at 24-hour blocks that allows advertisers to bid to have their tag listed as a trending topic. When Twitter users select the advertised trends, the account or tweet of the advertiser will be the first listed.

Twitter’s Promoted Products suite allows advertisers to target followers and follower lookalikes. Targeting can also be done based on interest, geography and demographic.

Speaking more about their partnership with Komli Media, Shailesh explained that Twitter needed to leverage on a strong regional partner with the networks to advertisers, something Komli Media already had in place. Matt Sutton, Senior Director at Komli SEA, talked about the high response from digital advertisers that the company has been getting since announcing their partnership with Twitter. Komli Media will function as Twitter’s regional sales partner and will be responsible in providing advertisers with the necessary trainings to use the platform.

Talking about how SingTel is evolving to using more engaging and social advertising platforms, Miguel shared that the company is prepared to go with the audience. As more customers become accustomed to accessing social platforms, he foresees that social platforms like Twitter will be an integral part of marketing and customer support. He mentioned that SingTel has been consistently investing resources into such efforts, including having a team dedicated to community management on social media. Twitter allows SingTel to interact with its customers on a more human level, creating and expression platform.

When asked about its revenue targets for Southeast Asia in 2013, Shailesh did not disclose any numbers. However, he mentioned that Twitter remains bullish about opportunities in the region, citing the “size of the audience” as a key reason. He also mentioned that Singapore remains the hub to engage companies in Southeast Asia as most of them have their main regional offices here.

With the launch of Twitter’s Promoted Products suite, SingTel customers can expect the first of such campaigns to be rolled out by midnight today.