Twitter appoints former Pearson chief Marjorie Scardino to board

Dame Marjorie Scardino, the former chief executive of publishing group Pearson, has joined the board of Twitter.

In a statement, the US social network, which floated on the New York Stock Exchange last month valued at $30bn, said Dame Marjorie will also join the audit commitee.

She has been granted a restricted stock award of 4018 shares, currently worth around $174,000.

It is the first major appointment for Twitter since its successful initial public offering last month, when shares in the social media business surged nearly 75pc on their first day of trading.

It is also the first major role for Dame Marjorie, 66, since she stepped down from the helm of Pearson, the publisher of the Financial Times newspaper, just over a year ago. She was the first female chief executive of a FTSE 100 company when she was appointed in 1997.

At Pearson, the Texan-born former lawyer is credited with expanding the company’s highly profitable education business, and keeping a sharp focus on technology. She tripled profits to a record £942m.

Penguin Books, which used to be wholly owned by Pearson before its recent merger with random House, was one of the publishers who resisted Amazon’s quasi-monopoly on ebooks by striking a controverisial deal with Apple designed to break its stranglehold.

The deal was subsequently hauled through the European and American courts, on the basis that it amounted to price-fixing.

Under Dame Marjorie, Pearson was also prepared to do battle with Apple. In 2011, the technology giant dropped the Financial Times’ iPhone and iPad applications from its app store after the newspaper refused to hand over 30pc of its revenues and valuable customer data.

Dame Marjorie is a recent convert to Twitter. She has two accounts – one private and one public. On Thursday she tweeted: “@twitter Thank you. There couldn’t be a more exciting time in Twitter’s history to join!”

Twitter's $1.8bn IPO On November 7 was the most highly anticipated technology offering since Facebook's in 2012. The shares closed more than 70pc above the $26 IPO price on their first day of trading and ended Wednesday at $43.69.

Dame Marjorie will be under pressure to help Twitter turn its enormous user base into profits.

The eight-year-old company, which allows users to post messages of 140 characters at a time, doubled revenues to $168.6m in the quarter to the end of September. However, net losses widened to $64.6m from $21.6m a year earlier. Analysts do not expect Twitter to turn a profit until at least 2015.