Starting Points: Masayoshi Son

May 18, 2010

Softbank to Help Twitter Get Even Bigger in Japan

By HIROKO TABUCHI

TOKYO — Twitter is set to get a big boost in Japan, one of its biggest and fastest-growing markets, after the Japanese cellphone carrier Softbank on Tuesday announced new handsets designed to link to the microblogging site, part of a major effort by Softbank to get a piece of America’s tech savvy.

Twitter has taken off in a big way here in the past two years, fanned by media exposure and the use of the service by a flurry of celebrities: Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama tweets frequently, as does the astronaut and national hero Soichi Noguchi, who tweets from the International Space Station.

The number of unique users in Japan surged from 521,000 in April 2009 to 7.52 million in March, a 15-fold increase, according to the technology ratings service Nielsen Online Japan. Figures show Twitter is fast catching up to Japan’s biggest social networking site, Mixi, which had about 10.8 million unique users in March. An analysis by Semiocast, based in Paris, in February found 14 percent of the millions of tweets per day worldwide are in Japanese.

Image by digitalbear via Flickr

Twitter’s reach in Japan — the percentage of Internet users who have used the service — is about 12.3 percent, higher than the service’s reach of 10.2 percent in the United States, according to Nielsen. The service trumps Facebook, another American social networking site that has made a foray into Japan, which only has about 1.4 million users in the country, or less than 1 percent of its global membership.

“Twitter has seen tremendous growth all around the world in the past year, but in particular we’ve seen outstanding growth in Japan,” Evan Williams, chief executive of Twitter, said via a live link from the company’s headquarters in San Francisco at a Softbank news conference here. “It’s become one of our biggest and most important countries.”

“We believe Twitter is poised for even greater growth given the tremendous usage of keitai in Japan, and because Twitter has always been focused on the mobile, cellphone experience,” Mr. Williams added, using the Japanese word for cellphone.

Softbank, Japan’s fastest-growing cellphone carrier, with about 22 million subscribers, has been pushing Twitter as a new way to get Japanese hooked on its mobile data services. Softbank, which is the sole carrier of the iPhone in Japan, also runs the country’s most popular search engine and biggest Internet provider, and recently won exclusive rights to bring the iPad to Japan.

Softbank’s founder and chief executive, Masayoshi Son, has been one of Twitter’s biggest fans, tweeting enthusiastically, posting frequent replies to questions from followers and urging all of Softbank’s employees to tweet. He uses Twitter even from his bathtub, he claimed, using an iPhone and a Ziploc bag.

“Twitter has changed my life, my lifestyle,” he said. Japan is in fact leapfrogging older sites like Facebook to register directly to Twitter. “That’s why it’s experiencing explosive growth here in Japan,” Mr. Son said.

The service has benefited from a certain kind of herd mentality in Japan.

“Whenever Twitter celebrities are introduced on TV, tens of thousands of Japanese start to use it,” said Nobuyuki Hayashi, a Japan-based technology expert and author of three books on Twitter. In cities like Tokyo, where many people live alone and inviting friends over is rare, a lot of people may have been craving conversation partners they are now finding on Twitter, he said.

Another big factor is the compact nature of the Japanese script means 140 characters allows for more substantial and complex posts. The word “internationalization,” for example, takes up just 3 characters in Japanese.

But there are plenty of more mundane tweets, often reflecting the nation's love of cuisine. “Midnight ramen now,” read a recent post by the user @ico390, followed by a link to a picture of noodles snapped on a cellphone.

Softbank also has a 30 percent stake in the Silicon Valley video streaming site Ustream, a service Mr. Son said he hoped would encourage users to tweet links to videos as well as photos.

Usage is especially high among Japanese in their 20s and 30s, is concentrated in big cities and about 44 percent of all users have tweeted from their cellphones, according to a 2010 survey of 5,500 Japanese by the Tokyo-based Fujitsu Research Institute.

Computer users connect to Twitter for an average of 4.4 hours a day, while those who use handsets log in for 2.3 hours, according to a separate study of 10,500 users by Ascii Media Works.

Softbank’s Twitter widget, or embedded application, will display an icon on the welcome screen of 14 cellphones from Softbank that lets users jump directly to a customized Twitter site, according to Softbank. Many phones also come with touch panels, TV receivers, solar cells and waterproofing.

“We expect to start growing faster than ever here with increased awareness of Twitter,” said Kevin Thau, Twitter’s mobile platform director, visiting Japan for Softbank’s announcement. “People tend to explore when they get new phones. It’s great for discoverability,” he said. The official Twitter widget on Softbank, he said, is hopefully “the start of a trend around the world.”

The growth in Japan adds to the good news at Twitter, which said last month that it had 106 million registered users and was adding new users at the rate of 300,000 a day.

Twitter’s service in Japan has long led the way in a quest by the company to take advantage of its rapid growth for revenue. Since Twitter’s Japan site went online in April 2008, it has carried ads — something the U.S site did not have. Companies from Sony to Toyota have set up corporate Twitter accounts.

Last month, Twitter finally unveiled an advertising program in the United States that shows up when users search for keywords that advertisers have bought to link to their ads.