Twitter Strengthens Latin American Reach With Brazil Office

With the FIFA World Cup (@WorldCup) coming up in 2014 and the 2016 Olympics (@olympics) to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Twitter is gearing up for a strong Latin American presence by setting up a sales office in Brazil. The social media firm, currently with offices in the UK and the US, has around 200 staff worldwide. Efforts to staff and market the new Brazil branch are being negotiated as of this writing. "The digital marketplace in Brazil is alive in a big way. We're really infatuated with the market there," said Adam Bain (@adambain), president in charge of global revenue. According to research firm Semiocast, Brazil is one of Twitter's largest markets with 41.2 million recorded users as of July 2012. The largest market is still the US with 107.7 million accounts.?Of the over half million people said to hold Twitter accounts, not necessarily active users, about 8 percent are based in Brazil. Other possible areas for expansion in the Latin American region include Chile and Mexico. Twitter presently records some 140 million active users, that is, accounts updated almost daily. The company expects to rake in upwards of $1 billion in revenue by 2014.