With its popularity continuing to grow, Twitter (News - Alert) has decided it’s time to follow in the footsteps of Facebook and set up shop in South America.  Currently, Twitter has over 500 million subscribers, with 40 million of those subscribers coming from Brazil, yet it has never set foot inside the South American country.

"We believe our new office in Brazil will allow us to get closer to the users and show the value of our platform," the company's new country manager for Brazil, Guilherme Ribenboim, told Reuters (News - Alert) in a recent interview."Brazil has rather mature Internet and advertisement markets. Our audience is very big and active," he said. "We are going to try to monetize it."

Just as Facebook (News - Alert) has done, Twitter will set up shop in Sao Paulo. Brazil boasts the world’s sixth-largest economy with a growing middle-class that already has attracted Amazon and Netflix aside from the aforementioned social media networks. It’s also Twitter’s second largest market in terms of accounts, behind the United States.

Those factors alone could lead a company to opening up a new office, but Twitter already has its sights set on two of the largest sporting events in the world: the 2014 Fifa World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics.

The 2012 Olympics held in London set a record for the company, reaching 150 million tweets. So advertisement and revenue opportunities for a company like Twitter are almost endless, a fact it knows and is working to capitalize on:

"The World Cup and the Olympic Games offer huge opportunities to leverage and show the potential of Twitter," said Ribenboim. "It is already happening. We are talking (to advertisers) looking for opportunities, strategies."

With the amount of subscribers doubling over the past year and ranking as the fifth largest market in terms of usage, making the move to Brazil was almost a no brainer for Twitter.

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