Twitter Is Huge in Brazil

Twitter, everybody's favorite microblogging platform turned information network, has been struggling with traffic slumps lately as the numbers have stalled since summer in the US after a huge growth period of a few months. After a while, it looked like things cooled off internationally as well, with visitor numbers staying flat all over the world in the last few months. New data from the social media analytics firm Sysomos suggests that Twitter is still raking in new users in some countries where it's seeing some very solid growth figures.

Twitter is becoming increasingly popular in places like Germany, Brazil and Indonesia, and those countries now make up a much bigger slice of the site's audience than just a few months ago.

"Considering the country of origin of twitters, among the most significant differences was a surge in Brazil, which accounted for 8.8% of unique users, an increase of more than four-fold from 2% in June. Twitter users in Indonesia accounted for 2.4% of the population, compared with less than 0.5%, while Twitter users in Germany rose to 2.5% from 1.5%," Sysomos writes.

"Meanwhile, the number of U.S. unique users was 50.8%, a sharp drop from 62.1% in June. This suggests that the use of Twitter outside the U.S. has experienced significant growth over the past six months," the report adds.

The study looked at over 13 million Twitter accounts since October to December to come up with the numbers. It found that, while usage in the US has leveled off, Twitter is picking up steam in other places of the world. The breakdown by city paints an even clearer picture as the top five tweeting cities in the world are, in order, London, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, New York City and Chicago. Interestingly, while Londoners love Twitter as much as always, Sao Paulo residents seem to be hooked on the short messaging system as well as they now make up 1.47 percent of Twitter's entire userbase.

The report also uncovered an interesting if startling statistic, the geolocation feature Twitter enabled a few months back in the API isn't a big hit with the Twittershpere. In fact, basically no one (0.23 percent) is using it at the moment. This can be explained by the fact that it's a relatively new feature, it isn't enabled on the site, and only a few Twitter client apps have implemented it. But, it's also clear that most people are reluctant to share their location in their tweets.