Twitter UK marks its first anniversary by reaching 10m active users, 80% of them mobile

A year ago, a service called Twitter, which had taken the web and mobiles by storm, opened up shop in London as part of its global expansion. A year later and with 10 million active users in the UK, it’s no wonder that this little bird is looking to hire and grow.

Twitter now has 140 million users globally, a rather neat match to go with the 140 character service based on sms message character limits. In the UK, 80 per cent of users are active on mobile which is not surprising. The service emerged mobile first when many other services were struggling to make the leap to phones and portable devices and it’s proven to be a great way to establish a business.

Boosting UK brands

As well as flourishing in its own business, Twitter is also providing ways for brands to find new audiences. More than 140 UK brands have advertised on the platform since Promoted Products were launched.

Cadbury used Twitter to raise awareness for the relaunch of its Wispa chocolate bars, the British Heart Foundation used the platform to create a buzz before releasing a television ad campaign and many other high profile brands like Adidas, Walkers and Marks and Spencer have all come to recognise the speed of Twitter’s word of mouth movement.

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Rachel Bremer is the European communications manager for Twitter and she notes that the service’s person to person tone goes a long way for brands to make an impact, “Twitter works well for brands when they have a voice and use the platform to connect on a personal level with their customers. That’s what’s great about Twitter – brands can share information, discounts, deals, have conversations with customers, listen to what customers are saying about them, and add valuable content to the conversation.”

Bolstering the troops

With sterling numbers to celebrate its first birthday in Blighty, it’s no surprise that Twitter UK is still hiring. There are more than 30 employees in the London office and more positions open in engineering waiting to be filled.

Looking to the future globally and in the UK, Twitter is hoping to ‘help users surface the most relevant content for them at any given moment in time’. That sounds like something may be coming in the world of search, but that would be speculation.

Twitter certainly has a lot of the digital world’s information flowing through its veins. More than 340 million Tweets pass through the platform every day.

Bremer leaves tantalising clues as to what is next, “It’s a huge engineering challenge to build a product and features that bring a single interesting Tweet or a single relevant account to a user exactly when they need it. It’s a needle in the haystack problem and something we’re very focused on right now. The Discover tab is one of the ways we’re trying to address is. Some of Tweetdeck’s more advanced features are also effective.”

When you gather so much of a population in one place, the next job must be to organise it. So, happy anniversary UK Twitter, you certainly have your work cut out for you!