Twitter Nabs A Longtime Facebooker And Yelp's First Salesperson To Drive Ad Sales

Monday, August 9th, 2010

MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

We’re planning to ramp up the advertising platform,” Twitter writes in an email today. That shouldn’t be too surprising, but they’re also announcing some key hires in order to make that happen.

Dan Coughlin is joining Twitter from Facebook, where he spent the past four years. He will be the new director of sales for the Eastern (U.S.) region. Meanwhile, Amanda Levy is joining Twitter from Yelp, where she spent the past five years. She’ll be the new director of sales for the West (U.S.) region.

Coughlin was previously the director of media sales at Facebook, and before that did the same work for Yahoo for five years. He’s also worked at MarketWatch and DoubleClick. Levy oversaw West Coast sales for Yelp — and she was actually their first salesperson (and 10th overall hire). By the time she left, she was managing a team of 100 people, Twitter says.

Obviously, both seem to be pretty impressive hires for Twitter. AdAge got a bit more information about what their specific roles will be. Notably, both will be reporting directly to COO Dick Costolo and will be working on building out the “Twitter Promoted Products” area of the service — the area consisting of Promoted Tweets and Trends. But more interesting may be what Twitter is planning besides those two products in terms of advertising. The service has made it clear that they’re open to all kinds of experimentation in a bid to make money. One of those is their Earlybird Offers.

Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Funding: $1.16B

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

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Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: January 2, 2004
Funding: $2.34B

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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Company: Yelp
Website: yelp.com
Launch Date: January 7, 2004
Funding: $56M

Another company founded in 2004 by two former PayPal employees. Yelp is a local reviews website covering the United States, Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands; Yelp drew an audience of more than 50 million unique visitors in March 2011. Yelpers have written more than 18 million local reviews, making Yelp the leading local guide for real word-of-mouth on everything from boutiques and mechanics to restaurants and dentists.

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