A Saudi prince – who is worth billions of dollars – and his holding company have decided to take some of that money to invest $300 million in Twitter (News - Alert), the popular microblogging site.

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, who is chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company (KHC), made the investment in collaboration with the holding company. The move expands his extensive media investments.

"Our investment in Twitter reaffirms our ability to identify opportunities to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact," Alwaleed said in a recent press release announcing the investment. Alwaleed has assets of about $19.6 billion, according to news reports. He is the nephew of the king of Saudi Arabia.

Twitter is best known for its tweets, which are no more than 140 characters. Some 250 million tweets each day are broadcast on Twitter. In addition, the social media site has over 100 million active users. It is still far smaller than Facebook (News - Alert), which has some 750 million users.

Twitter has yet to hold an IPO, even though it is something that should get a lot of interest from investors. Just a few months ago, Twitter was able to raise an impressive $400 million from venture capitalists. In addition, Twitter was valued at $8 billion in October, according to reports on TMCnet.

In its analysis of the new deal, Reuters News Service points out how “Twitter was a key means of communication for protesters in the Arab Spring revolts this year, violence that threatened Saudi Arabia until the kingdom unveiled a populist $130 billion social spending package.”

"The Arab world, of course, knows full well the value of Twitter,” Bernhard Warner, co-founder of Social Media Influence, added in comments to Reuters (News - Alert). “In the past year, it has been a force in politics, in regime change, so there is not a single person in that region in a position of influence who is not following the increasing power of Twitter… (Alwaleed) must see Twitter as something that is going to be a really powerful broadcast channel.”

"One of the few sectors to record significant revenue gains in the last three years has been technology, which is why Kingdom would see Twitter as a good addition to its diversified portfolio," Hesham Tuffaha, head of asset management at Bakheet Investment Group in Riyadh, speculated in comments he made to Reuters.

Earlier this year, Twitter indicated it wanted to raise $800 million, which makes the total investments raised by the company about $1 billion, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. One of the key previous investors in Twitter was Digital Sky Technologies, a venture capital firm based in Russia.

KHC is a major investor, too, of News Corp (News - Alert), where it owns some seven percent of the global media company’s stock. It was recently reported that Alwaleed will soon start a cable news channel.

Alwaleed has invested in other media companies, as well as those focused on entertainment. For example, Kingdom Holding has a 29.9 percent share in the Saudi Research and Marketing Group (SRMG).