VimpelCom brings Twitter services for its 223 million customers in emerging and developed mobile markets via the recently announced partnership with the social media giant. Vimpelcom which operates in 14 countries said that the partnership with Twitter will enable the global communications service provider to use Twitter's mobile portfolio of services aimed at emerging countries including Twitter SMS and Twitter USSD which are both effective methods to introduce mobile data service to subscribers. At present, Twitter has 284 million active users with 80% posting to the social media channel from their mobile devices, said VimpelCom.
VimpelCom said that the partnership will see the introduction of tailored programs allowing VimpelCom operations to have their own Twitter timelines and engage directly with local customers even without a Twitter account and use customized Twitter support for local and international social, sports or cultural events. In addition, VimpelCom will also leverage Twitter's direct messaging service to atttend to customer enquiries and provide information on their accounts and promotional activities. VimpelCom said that with 3.5 billion Tweets sent every week, there is no other service that is simultaneously public, real-time, conversational and widely distributed.
The partnership with Twitter extends on VimpelCom's partnership with other popular content providers namely WhatsApp and Wikimedia and app and content stores such as Google Play and Windows that enable VimpelCom's subscribers to make digital payments and with Opera Software that provides the Opera Web Pass service and compression capability to reduce the amount of data used for browsing the internet.
Mikhail Gerchuk, VimpelCom’s Group Chief Commercial Officer
Social networks have become an essential part of our customer life and VimpelCom aims to provide the best mobile internet customer experience by partnering with leading internet companies. Our partnership with Twitter, one of the world leaders in social network services, will offer our customers new reasons to use internet on their mobiles every day and it will re-define customer service using world-class customer support via Twitter.
Jana Messerschmidt, Vice President, Global BD & Platform, Twitter, Inc
We are happy to share our knowledge in social networking with VimpelCom. Together we can make information breaking around the world accessible for users. This partnership will help VimpelCom connect its users to the content on the Internet that matters most to them.
