Twitter to open office in Brazil, its second-biggest market after the US in accounts

Twitter is opening a new office in its second-biggest market by users: Brazil. The new office, Reuters reports, will allow Twitter more direct access to the 40 million users of the service in that country.

“We believe our new office in Brazil will allow us to get closer to the users and show the value of our platform,” Twitter’s country manager for Brazil, Guilherme Ribenboim, told Reuters. “Brazil has rather mature Internet and advertisement markets. Our audience is very big and active. We are going to try to monetize it.”

In addition to being second in number of Twitter accounts, Brazil is fifth in usage, according to numbers from Semiocast, though that growth is slow due to Facebook’s popularity in the country.

The reports says that only 1/3 of Brazil’s tweets are posted from mobile devices, which is half of the volume posted from mobile in the US.

Facebook overtook Google’s Orkut in Brazil with over 36M visitors back in January of 2012. At that time, Twitter sat at 4th in Comscore’s numbers. In 2012, Internet Media Services took on ad sales for Twitter across Spanish-speaking Latin America. Opening an office could very well mean that Twitter wants more direct control of its ad efforts in the area.

In November of 2012, Comscore reported that Latin Americans spent 56% more time on social networking sites than the worldwide average, with Brazilians spending 9.7 hours on sites that month. At that time, Facebook remained on top, with LinkedIn following and Twitter scoring the third slot. Orkut wrapped up fourth place with a 62% drop y/y.

Twitter hired Ribenboim as its first general director in Brazil in November of 2012. We’ve reached out to Twitter to confirm the office opening.

By way of confirmation, Twitter pointed us to Ribenboim’s tweet in December:

Queria agradecer aos jornalistas que participaram no nosso evento de lancamento. Otimas perguntas e interacao. Ate breve! #TwitterNoBrasil

— guilherme ribenboim (@guilhermerib) December 5, 2012

Image Credit: Sean Gallup/Staff