Twitter has tied up with Bharti Airtel of India to expand its network through mobile phone SMS. With this deal Twitter will be available to over 100 million subscribers of Airtel in India at the standard SMS rates. Airtel is the largest mobile phone service provider in India which has a population of about 1.1 billion and has about 500 million phones; and out of these, about 100 million phones are serviced by Airtel. As the broadband (256 Kbps download) subscriber base in India is very limited – only about 7 million in August, 2009, as against the phone subscriber base of about 494 million in the same month, Twitter has tried to tap into the mobile SMS to expand its reach.
In fact, Twitter itself notes the importance of mobile texting vis-à-vis Internet in these words:
“As powerful as the Internet has become for the democratization of information, its range is limited when compared to mobile texting—a format uniquely native to Twitter. There are over one billion people with internet access on the planet but there are more than four billion people with mobile phones and Twitter can work on all of them because even the simplest of these devices feature SMS.”
Therefore, obviously Twitter realizes that if it can expand quickly through mobile SMS, it has a potential 400% additional people who can be targeted by it.
As per this deal with Bharti Airtel, people can now send tweets at standard SMS rates and receive tweets for free through their mobile phones. If you’re an Airtel mobile phone subscriber in India, you can try Twitter with your Airtel phone by sending START to 53000. You won’t have to pay International SMS rates for that.
It may be pointed out that initially Twitter will be available in India on SMS only on the Airtel network. As per the information available on Airtel website, there is exclusivity for the same for 4 weeks, during which only Airtel subscribers will be able to use the service on SMS across India. Therefore, after this initial period of 4 weeks, Twitter will perhaps be expanding to other mobile networks in India, such as Reliance, Vodafone, Idea, Tata indicom, BSNL and MTNL.
An existing Twitter user in India, who is also an Airtel subscriber, can link his mobile device to his Twitter A/c by sending SMS “Start” to 53000 @ Re 1 (INR) per SMS; thereafter, he may follow instructions to complete linking his Airtel phone to the Twitter A/c.
A new user to Twitter (who is also an Airtel subscriber) can send SMS “Signup” to 53000 @ Re 1 per SMS and then he has to follow instructions to complete the registration.
The General Guidelines & Keywords to Twitter Use can be seen here.
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