In a visit to campus Tuesday, a Twitter official outlined the founding of the international social media platform and addressed its expanding role in revamping the nature of advertising.

Twitter Chicago advertising representative Alex Grant, a University of Wisconsin alumnus said Twitter was a product before it was a company, and it has gained an instrumental place in worldwide communication.

Information on Twitter can spread in real time, leading the company to want to shrink down the world and make information more accessible, Grant said.

Users can tweet from almost any device, including computers, tablets and mobile devices by sending text messages or logging onto the website. According to Grant, nearly 57 percent of active users utilize Twitter from a mobile device.

Grant emphasized the importance of quality over quantity as one of Twitter’s most important functions.

“High value content will make its way out and be shared,” he said.

However, he said nearly 40 percent of Twitter users do not tweet at all. This was a surprising but reassuring statistic for UW student Bryce Dalzin, who said he felt better knowing he was using the site properly, even though he does not tweet.

“I’m still a part of Twitter,” Dalzin said.

Knowing people use Twitter without ever tweeting reinforces the notion that Twitter connects people with their interests, Grant said.

He also said at the inception of Twitter, advertising seemed like the best way to make it a more successful business, but creating ads that did not annoy users could pose a challenge.

“Instead of creating ad products that weren’t just adding things, we wanted to amplify organic activity on the platform,” Grant said. “So we made ads out of tweets.”

With this concept in mind, Twitter’s advertisements now consist of promoted accounts, trends and tweets aimed to engage users and target followers.

Twitter has also made it easier for businesses to have a home on the site, Grant said, by creating opportunities to enhance profile pages with customization and graphics as well as the ability to pin a tweet to the top of a page.

Also, he said tweets containing media like pictures or video links can now be expanded online, exposing the media right in the tweet without having to open it in a new window. These additions provide brands with a better ability to create a nice user experience, Grant said.

“It’s interesting hearing how companies’ campaigns are driven using Twitter,” Kelly Duerr, a UW student, said.

Duerr said she considered Twitter just a social outlet before hearing the presentation and it was interesting to see its other values and the future of the business.

Grant explained the Twitter mission statement as connecting people everywhere to what is important to them, driving home Twitter’s importance to engagement and sharing among its users.

“One can move the world with 140 characters,” Grant said. “You are what you tweet.”