Saudi billionaire Prince Walid bin Talal and his Kingdom Holding Company yesterday announced a combined investment of $300 million in the social networking site Twitter.

“Our investment in Twitter reaffirms our ability in identifying suitable opportunities to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact,” Prince Walid said in the statement released on Kingdom Holding’s website.

The statement said that the investment was finalised after “several months of negotiations” and represented a “strategic stake” in the social networking site.

Prince Walid, a media mogul and one of the world’s richest men, in September announced plans to launch Alarab, a pan-Arab news channel, by 2012, saying the television network will promote freedom of speech.

Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook played a crucial role in spreading information and organising protests in the revolutions that have rocked the Arab world since January.

In Syria today, where the inter-national media have been banned from reporting on the uprising against the regime’s bloody crackdown on demonstrators, activists use Twitter, Facebook and other websites to get news on their struggle to the outside world.

“We believe that social media will fundamentally change the media industry landscape in the coming years,” said Ahmed Halawani, the executive director for Kingdom Holding’s private equity and international investments.

Kingdom Holding owns 29.9 per cent of the shares in the Saudi Research and Marketing Group, which publishes several leading newspapers and magazines, including the Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper and Al Eqtisadieh.

According to a November study by Semiocast, an institute that studies social networks,Arabic language tweets have risen sharply since the Arab Spring uprisings, with two million tweets per day recorded in October 2011 - a sharp contrast against only 99,000 tweets per day at the same time last year.