Twitter eyes Japan, Britain to push users’ growth

In a fresh bid to recover from the stalled users’ growth and declining revenue, micro-blogging website Twitter has joined hands with business listing and review site Yelp to supply location services for Japan and Britain inside its app.

The Yelp integration will give Twitter users in Japan and Britain an option of selecting places provided by Yelp when they tag a location in their tweets, technology website TechCrunch reported on Saturday.

According to Yelp, the service has gone live on iOS and Android platforms and will soon be available to Twitter on internet.

“Twitter users in the UK and Japan can now simply tap the location icon to add Yelp geotags to Tweets,” Chad Richard, senior vice president of business and corporate development at Yelp, posted.

When users click on particular places, they will see a separate card with businesses’ Yelp ratings, locations, and even a direct link to Yelp’s app.

When Twitter users click on places when reading tweets, they will get a separate card with more details like address and Yelp rating, along with a link to go directly to view that venue on the Yelp app itself, the report added.

More location data can help Twitter lay the groundwork for a new advertising unit based around locations. It can also potentially sell that on to the companies that are being flagged in the tags.

However, Twitter users in the US will keep receiving venue suggestions from search and discovery service mobile app Foursquare after tagging the location of their tweets.

The Yelp integration for Japan and Britain also gives the micro-blogging site some more staying power with users to let the interest grow. It is also another move to expand the functionality of its platform, TechCrunch added.

According to the micro-blogging website, it now has more than 300 million active users, far less when compared with Facebook’s 1.5 billion users making it more popular, faster, and the choice of more marketers.

Twitter reported 305 million monthly active users for the fourth quarter this year, compared to 307 million in the third quarter that excluded SMS-only followers.

In an attempt to bring tweets to more people across the globe, Twitter is planning to introduce an algorithmic timeline like Facebook. The timeline will reorder tweets based on what Twitter’s algorithm thinks people most want to see.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has made several moves, including cutting jobs and naming Google’s former chief business officer, Omid Kordestani, as Twitter’s executive chairman.

Under Dorsey, Twitter has released a news curation feature “Moments” and the company is reportedly working to extend Twitter’s identifying 140-character limit to 10,000.
Twitter is also set for a major overhaul under Dorsey to revive the company’s fortune with some of the high-profile executives putting in their papers.