14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has been heralded as an international phenomenon for quite a while, but until recently, it was still very much an American company with a large US user base. However, that is changing and fast, as, according to a report put out by Semiocast, Asia is now the biggest user of Twitter, in terms of tweet volume. Usage on the continent is steadily rising and has now surpassed that in North America.
“Asia is now the first and fastest growing region compared to the results published three months ago. The analysis additionally showed that the U.S. now only account for 25% of messages on Twitter, down from 30% in March 2010,” the study read.
“The figures broken down by regions are: Asia 37% up from 31.5% three months ago, North America 31% down from 36%, South America stable at 15%, Europe 14% down from 15%, Africa 1.5% up from 1%, Oceania stable at 1.5%,” it continued.
The increase in usage in Asia is pretty impressive and shows that the service is still growing at a very rapid pace in some areas. Usage elsewhere has stayed relatively flat with only Europe seeing a small dip. As a country, the US is still the biggest Twitter user, with 25 percent of tweets originating there, but that represents a 5 percentage points drop since March.
Japan is the second largest user, with 18 percent of the tweets, followed by Indonesia, which is counted as being in Asia, with 12 percent. Brazil then follows after a small gap while the UK comes in fifth place with more than 5 percent of the total number of tweets.
And the trends show no signs of changing, Twitter continues to grow internationally but less so in the US. This may very well be because it has reached its ceiling in its home country, but with Facebook at 500 million users and Twitter at just over 100 million, there’s certainly room to grow worldwide.