New Twitter Korea CEO takes office
New CEO of Twitter Korea Shin Chang-seop took office Monday as the social networking service is gaining more traction here.
Since the Korean branch of Twitter was established in 2013, Shin, formerly a senior vice president of the company, had been in charge of its adverting strategy and sales in Korea.
Twitter saw the number of daily users globally increase by 14 percent in the first quarter of this year, but the figure in Korea grew more than threefold during the same period.
This explosive growth is attributable to the nation’s recent political events from massive candlelit rallies to impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye to the early presidential election.
In the wake of the political corruption scandal last October involving Park, people took to the streets to protest against her. And a Constitutional Court ruling removed her from office this March, which led to the May 9 election, in which former opposition leader Moon Jae-in was elected.
In addition, Twitter’s sales in Korea also rose by 80 percent compared to the same quarter last year, posting the highest record among its global offices.
To ride on the winning note, Shin plans to make his company more competitive by strengthening its partnership with local content players from K-pop to broadcasting to sports, which he believes will attract more Korean users.
“Recent political and cultural issues have helped sharply increase the number of users,” Shin said. “We will also try to come up with projects for Twitter to become a window for Korea’s main issues.”
Shin, who majored in journalism and broadcasting at Yonsei Univeristy in Seoul, worked for Hewlett Packard, Tibco Software and Google Korea before joining Twitter.