Twitter hires Marjorie Scardino as board's first woman Twitter has hired its first female director by adding Marjorie Scardino, the former Pearson chief executive, to its board a month after it went public. Dame Marjorie, 66, who was the first female chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, has experience managing media companies including the Financial Times and the Economist as part of her role at Pearson. This background could be valuable to Twitter, which has transformed the news industry, although Dame Marjorie greatly reduced Pearson's exposure to advertising, the core of Twitter's business model. Her extensive experience outside the US, having run a London-listed company, may also help the US-centric, venture capital and technology-heavy board as the messaging platform grows internationally. Twitter said it was pleased to welcome Dame Marjorie to the board and she replied in her first ever tweet: "There couldn't be a more exciting time in Twitter's history to join!" She had previously used the site but described herself as a "Twitter follower." Twitter listed in New York last month in the most hotly anticipated technology initial public offering of the year. Shares jumped more than 70 per cent on the first day of trading, as eager investors valued it at more than $30bn. The company is set to go on an acquisition spree, using some of the more than $2bn it raised, plus a new $1bn credit line, to hunt down companies that can bolster its monetisation efforts. Twitter's losses widened to $134m in the first nine months of the year, up from $70.7m for the same period a year earlier. Revenues for the first three quarters rose 106 per cent to $422m. During the IPO process, the company was criticised for having an all-male board. Dick Costolo, chief executive, maintained that the company intended to have many women on its board. Dame Marjorie is its first appointment since it went public. As chief executive of Pearson for 16 years until the end of 2012, she was credited with transforming the London-listed group from a conglomerate owning stakes in diverse businesses from television production to waxworks. Focusing Pearson on the growing global market for education, she invested earlier than many rivals in digital learning technologies. Having at first faced accusations that she overpaid, Dame Marjorie was later credited with positioning Pearson ahead of most traditional publishers as the slow-moving school and college market began to adopt tablets and other interactive learning tools. Earlier this year she also left the board of Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone maker that struggled to adapt to the smartphone era, where she had served for two years. She chairs the MacArthur Foundation board and remains a director of two charities, the Carter Centre UK and Oxfam. Dame Marjorie will receive more than 4,000 Twitter shares, worth about $170,000 at today's price, as restricted stock units. Twitter also announced on Thursday that it will help advertisers to target people who have already visited their website and tempt them back through promoted tweets. This so-called "retargeting" is common across the web and Twitter said trials had seen "impressive results." Advertisers recorded substantial increases in engagement and conversion rates, and a fall in the cost of acquiring a customer. But Twitter, which has been praised by campaigners for its privacy policies, said users can chose not to see tailored ads. Her appointment at Twitter follows news last month that Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt had joined the board of The Economist Group, which is part-owned by Pearson.