US still top Twitter country, Brazil climbs to second [Study]

The US is still the country with the highest population of Twitter users and Brazil overtook Japan to climb into second place. The most active country on the social network, however, is still the Netherlands. That’s according to a new study from French-based research firm Semiocast.

The results of the study also put a number of emerging market countries in the top ten when it comes to user numbers. Some of them, however, lag when it comes to engagement on the social network.

Some 107-million Twitter accounts are based in the US, meaning that it represents 28.1% of all Twitter users. It also puts it some distance ahead of the 30-million plus accounts of second placed Brazil.

Other emerging market countries with a place in the top 10 countries include Indonesia, India, Mexico and the Philippines.

The BRICS powerhouse is still, however, less active on the social network than its Asian counterpart.

According to Semiocast, 30% of Japanese accounts posted a message in the period covered by the study, compared to 25% for the Brazilians. This level activity puts it just behind the Dutch, where 33% of accounts tweeted during the period under investigation.

In fact, the study found Japanese was the second most commonly used language on Twitter, after English. The highest emerging market country when it comes to engagement is Indonesia in fifth place, with Venezuela following closely behind it in sixth.

The level of engagement in the Netherlands is six percent higher than the global average of 27%. Semiocast reckons the primary reason these figures are so low because “many Twitter users mostly use the service to read tweets from others”.

The low positioning of India and the Philippines when it comes to engagement lies in stark contrast to their high user populations, suggesting that they may be among the prime offenders when it comes to watching Twitter rather than engaging on it.

The research firm claims that it analysed 383 million Twitter profiles for the study and 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)”.