Twitter reaches half a billion accounts
More than 140 millions in the U.S.

Geolocation analysis of Twitter accounts and tweets by Semiocast

Paris, France — July, 30th 2012 — Semiocast's latest study reveals Twitter reached the half billion accounts mark in June 2012, including more than 140 million in the U.S. alone. User-base growth is slowing in Japan and Korea, yet Japan remains one of the most active countries. In June 2012, the top three cities by number of tweets were Jakarta, Tokyo and London.

Semiocast has analyzed 517 million of Twitter user profiles created before July 1st 2012 as well as a sample of 1.058 billion public tweets posted from June 1st to June 30th 2012. Drawing from its experience with previous studies, Semiocast used its proprietary platform, databases and tools to process user profiles in order to determine the location of each user using all available information: free-form location declared in user profile, time zone, language used to post tweets and GPS coordinates for the very few concerned tweets. Indeed, more than 2.5 years after Twitter introduced the ability to post tweets with GPS coordinates, this feature is only used in 0.77% of all public tweets.

With 141.8M accounts created before July 1st, 2012, the United States now represent 27.4% of all Twitter users, down from 28.1% in January. In June 2012, these users posted 25.8% of all public tweets: the United States still dominate Twitter nations but growth is higher abroad.

Registration rate is still very high in Brazil, which grew from 33.3M in January to 41.2M in July 2012. Brazilians now represent 8.0% of all Twitter accounts, but only 6.6% of all public tweets posted in June, which may account for different usage patterns of Twitter. The two largest cities in Brazil rank among the top 20 cities in terms of tweets: São Paulo ranks 4th and Rio de Janeiro ranks 16th.

Japan, which lost to Brazil its second rank in terms of number of user profiles in January, recorded the second slowest growth in the top 50 countries (only +17% in six months, after South Korea which grew by a mere 16%). Yet, the country remains the second most active country in terms of posted tweets: in June 2012, 10.6% of all public tweets were posted from Japan, while Japanese users represent 6.7% of all Twitter users. As a result, Japanese remains the second most used language on Twitter, after English (cf. Semiocast's previous study Arabic highest growth on Twitter — English expression stabilizes below 40%).

The gap between the U.K. (4th) and Indonesia (5th) is narrowing. These countries now account for 32.2M and 29.4M user profiles respectively. The following countries are India, Mexico, Canada, Spain and the Philippines. France, where Semiocast is headquartered, accounts for 7.3M user profiles (1.4% share, 18th country), down from 1.6% share in January.

Jakarta most active Twitter city

This study reveals that users from Jakarta were the most active within all cities ranked by the number of posted tweets. Using Semiocast's technology, 27% of all public tweets were geo-localized at the city level. More than 2% of all these tweets were posted from the capital of Indonesia, witnessing the activity of Twitter in the country. Bandung, its second largest metropolitan area, ranks 6th.

Unsurprisingly, Tokyo ranks second. London ranks third, and the next city in the U.K. is Manchester and accounts for about 0.4% of all public tweets geo-localized at the city level. The first U.S. city is New York and only ranks 5th. As a sign that Twitter grew out of its homeland, San Francisco, where the company is headquartered, represent less than 0.2% of all tweets geo-localized at the city level.

Arabic usage continues to grow on Twitter: it is now the 6th language with 2.8% of all public tweets posted in June 2012. As another sign of this growth, Riyadh is now the 10th most active city, and the number of registered users in Saudi Arabia grew by +93% in six months, reaching 2.9M.

About Semiocast

Semiocast is a company based in Paris, France, providing data intelligence and research on social media. Semiocast helps its clients measure and evaluate reactions of consumers to a campaign or product launch, to understand buzzes and what consumers are saying about their products, services and brands on social media conversations. In 2011, Semiocast launched Semioboard, a multilingual social media monitoring dashboard for brands and agencies.

Read more

Read more publications from Semiocast.