If any more evidence was needed that social networks take marketing very seriously, Twitter's UK headquarters has announced they intend to hire a PR Agency.




With the milestone of a year in its London offices recently passed and over 10 million active accounts in Britain alone, the move of hiring a PR Agency to push themselves even further into the public domain and truly challenge Facebook for mainstream popularity.

According to PR Week and The Wall marketing blog:
“The pitch process, which coincides with an agency search by rival LinkedIn, has seen the site hold talks with a number of consumer agencies with the aim of rapidly boosting user numbers.
“Although it is viewed as an important site by journalists, brands and celebrities, Twitter has just ten million active UK users. Facebook has 30 million registered UK users. Twitter’s chosen agency will be charged with making the site’s content more relevant to consumers by creating media outreach programmes using human interest stories about its users.

“The search is not expected to cover corporate or crisis comms work, despite the brand being at the centre of a number of controversies over the past year,” PR Week reports.

It is a curious move by Twitter. They need to build on their success in the UK as the number one sharer of instant news; regularly referred to in newspapers and on televised news bulletins, as well as promoted hashtags coinciding with live shows and real-time events keeping its users on the pulse. But to adapt the brand to a more personal medium, diversifying slightly from "journalists, brands and celebrities" and shifting more relevance to its average user is a tricky area to push into. While "power to the people" is laudable, Facebook dominates that social sphere so massively that making Twitter more "personal" might not be its ultimate utility. But the growing influence in  social media and its ever-changing, organic process makes moves like this one a very exciting one.