Twitter is big in emerging markets: just ask China, India and Mexico

Well this is interesting. Twitter’s most active country is China, where the Great Firewall is meant to keep it out. According to a new report from eMarketer it seems the firewall isn’t doing its job.

The Chinese government has done its best to keep out most Western social networks, but tech-savvy citizens have been accessing these networks by using tools such as VPNs to bypass the Great Firewall.

According to a September 2012 GlobalWebIndex report cited by eMarketer, there were 35.5-million active Twitter users in China during Q2 of this year making it the most active Twitter nation. The list is quite emerging markets-heavy, featuring India in second place with 33-million active users, then Brazil and Mexico with 19.6-million and 11.7-million respectively. The United States comes in third with 22.9-million active users. According to GlobalWebIndex, active users are users that have “used or contributed to the platform at least once a month.”

According to eMarketer, during Q2 2012, 61% of users in China shared personal photos via Twitter, 49% in India and 44% in Mexico.

According to the research company, around 124-million users posted to the microblogging platform during the quarter, of Twitter’s 262-million active users. In comparison to Facebook’s 400-million users who posted during the period and the 653-million active users on the service, it doesn’t seem like much (but at least it’s better than Google+, where only 76-million users posted an update).

Users are engaging more on social media while watching TV, fueling the growth of social TV. An August 2012 Ericsson ConsumerLab study that polled 12 000 participants from a dozen countries showed that 62% of consumers worldwide used social media while watching TV.

This new study shows that tweeting while watching TV is up in some emerging markets regions like China and India but there has been a drop in areas like Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. But some of these regions still had higher numbers than the UK and France.

The folks at The Next Web report that among global social platforms, Twitter is ranked sixth with an “estimated reach of about 16 percent of the world’s online population”.