14 DAY TRIAL // In the recent months, Twitter has finally made it clearer how many users it has and where they come from, apps versus the site. And the revelation has been impressive, Twitter gets 190 million visitors each month and has more than 100 million registered users. But if there’s anything that Facebook has proven, it is that the growth ceiling for an Internet service is very, very high. And the trends in several countries around the world show that Twitter has yet a lot of room to grow.
Pingdom compiled some data from Google Trends for Websites to come up with the countries where Twitter is seeing the strongest growth. While the numbers themselves can’t be expected to be extremely accurate, even dedicated analytics companies have trouble figuring out how many people use Twitter, the trends they indicate are real and informative.
Five countries in South America seem to have seen the biggest growth lately, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela. Only Brazil has more than one million Twitter users, the number is close to two million there, but, if the growth rate keeps up, the other countries will be getting close to the milestone soon enough. All countries have at least doubled the number of users since January 2010.
There are four countries in Asia where Twitter adoption seems to be flourishing, with Japan leading the way followed by India, South Korea and Taiwan. Still, the numbers are small. There are about two million users in Japan, where Twitter has always been particularly popular, but the audience is much smaller in the other countries.
Elsewhere in the world, in Italy, Russia and Spain, Twitter is growing fast. With only a few hundreds of thousands of users, they’re not exactly big markets for the site, but they are getting bigger and fast. Note that these countries are not necessarily the biggest users of Twitter in the region, just where the biggest growth is seen. Already, more than half of the users are outside the US and, if Facebook is any indication, international users are going to become even more numerous on Twitter.