Twitter currently has over 302 million monthly active users globally, reflecting a growth of 18% year-on-year, Twitter CFO Anthony Noto informed during the company’s Q1 2015 earnings conference call. The US market represents 65 million MAUs or 21.52% of the global users. He added that the company has prioritzed emerging markets as a growth vehicle and added a new set of users known as SMS fast followers. These are users who sign up and access Twitter solely via SMS. The number of SMS fast followers in the quarter was approximately six million. Twitter is now working with Bangalore-based mobile marketing & analytics platform ZipDial which it bought earlier this year. Twitter and ZipDial had developed a platform where users could get could receive tweets from a Twitter account via SMS by dialing a phone number. Rishi Jaitly, head of Twitter India, had said that similar approaches would be now developed to provide a “taste” of Twitter to those with limited internet access and tempting them to download their app. "As we now have specific initiatives in place to grow and monetize this user base, we will begin counting SMS fast followers and our total MAU count going forward," Noto added in the conference call. Responding to an anlyst query, Noto said that they have started monetizing SMS fast followers in a small way and did that with one partner around the IPL. "But today, the monetization rate of SMS fast followers is going to be meaningfully lower than the monetization rate of any of our…
