Twitter’s ad arm canvasses mobile app revenue with developers in Vietnam

U.S. social network Twitter Inc. appears ready to tap into the Vietnamese market as its ad arm earlier this week held two separate meetings with local app developers to seek cooperation opportunities.

The MoPub App Developer Meetup was organized in Ho Chi Minh City on Monday, and in Hanoi the following day, by MoPub, a mobile-focused advertising exchange Twitter purchased in September last year.

These were MoPub’s first meetups in Vietnam and the events gathered around 30 local app developers in each city, where they talked about how to increase revenue from mobile apps, according to an announcement The MoPub Team posted on event-sharing site Eventbrite.com.

MoPub’s technology lets mobile application publishers manage their inventory and optimize multiple sources of advertising – direct ads, house ads, ad networks and real-time bidding through the MoPub Marketplace – in a single product, Twitter said in a blog post to announce the US$350 million acquisition on September 9, 2013.

Four MoPub representatives introduced the technology to Vietnamese app developers during the meetups, while seeking to establish cooperation with them.

Phu Tran, business development manager at Twitter, told Vietnamese-language newswire Vietnam News Agency that MoPub hopes to find many collaboration opportunities in the Southeast Asian country.

A local app developer told the Hanoi-based newswire that MoPub’s sending of representatives to Vietnam is a good sign.

“One of the four MoPub representatives visiting Vietnam is of Vietnamese origin, this could prove that our market is valued by MoPub,” he said, referring to Phu Tran.

The app developer expressed his hope that Twitter will create stronger strategies to conquer the Vietnamese market.

Vietnam had more than 33 million Internet users as of the end of last year, according to the white book released by the Ministry of Information and Communications.

The Southeast Asian country is also a booming market for social networks and mobile data users.

But there is still room for Twitter to grow as its micro-blogging platform is not as widely used here as Facebook.