Is Twitter’s Big Gaming Play About Influencer Marketing?

A key hire shows that the short-form social masters at Twitter are getting more heavily into electronic gaming. With the addition of Rodrigo Velloso, who was most recently YouTube’s director of gaming content, the 140-character platform shows it is getting serious about the gaming industry.

It’s no surprised that Twitter would want to dip into the $92 billion dollar video gaming industry. The company has struggled financially and had a hard time adding new users. Building more relationships with the video game publishers, social media creators that stream popular games, and the burgeoning eSports world could certainly help them get a piece of an industry that dwarfs the film and music industries combined.

Velloso comes to Twitter with years of experience building relationships with popular YouTubers that broadcast gameplay to millions of subscribers. He has assumed the newly-created role of director of gaming partnerships, reporting into the company’s media department. However, whether this means Twitter will expand the ability to provide gaming content on the platform or simply help them take a larger role in connecting brands to social media creators as part of influencer marketing campaigns remains to be seen.

Twitter has already been finding ways to expand beyond the severity of its character limit to allow Direct Messages to be longer and to incorporate a closer connection with Periscope, its streaming app. Velloso’s expertise could help them grow streaming viewership there and also help Twitter partner with other networks to use the short-form tool for amplification to YouTube, Twitch, and other streamers in the gaming space.

Velloso wasted no time in building his first partnership. Twitter already connected with The Game Awards earlier this month and used SnappyTV and Twitter video to promote tweets. They also used Twitter Mirror, which streamed real-time GIFs and selfies from the red carpet. That combination of tools may help Twitter build beyond its current functionality into a social media platform that hosts more influencer marketing campaigns itself rather than simply pointing to them elsewhere in the social media world.