Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia has invested $300 million in microblogging service Twitter, adding another media brand to his international investment portfolio that includes the likes of Apple Inc., Walt Disney and News Corp.

Prince A-Waleed bin Talal

Going by an independent valuation, in October, which valued Twitter at $8 billion, the investment by Al-Waleed, a nephew of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, who was estimated by Forbes this year to have a fortune of over $19 billion, is pegged at just below 4 percent.

The investment was a secondary market transaction, meaning that Al-Waleed and his Kingdom Holding Co. investment firm bought the shares from existing shareholders instead of making a direct investment after "months of negotiations", media reports said.

The move also comes in the wake of the Arab Spring revolts this year, in which Twitter played a key role in communication that threatened Saudi Arabia's monarchy until it unveiled a populist $130 billion social spending package.

The five-year-old Twitter, which allows people to send 140-character messages, or "Tweets", to groups of followers, is one of the Internet's most popular social networking services with more than 100 million active users who log onto the service at least once a month.