I decided to have a look at the “Twitter Phenomenon” by looking at some interesting facts and figures and it was quite a revelation. I looked at
- Growth Rates in comparison to other social media
- Subscribers by Country
- Country interest in Twitter as measured by Google searches
The USA has the largest Twitter user base due to its population size and early adoption of the the technology the other nations are quickly taking a high level of interest.
Current estimates have Twitter with over 8 Million users after 3 years at the end of March, 2009 .
Growth rates compared to other social media
Nielsen (Figures as published February, 2009) also looked at Twitter and compared it with other social networking sites in terms of growth over the last 12 months and Twitter easily took top spot with a phenomenonal 1382% growth compared to Zimbio with 240% annual growth and Facebook with 228%
Twitter\’s blog shows the subscriber share from different countries
The USA is top in overall market share at 40% This equates to approximately 3.2 Million Tweeters in the US with the international community sharing the other 6o%
- Japan has 39% of the International share with approx 1.87 Million
- Spain at 11% (approx 528,000)
- UK is 10% (approx 480,000)
- Brazil has 7% ( approx 336,000)
- Canada\’s share is 7% ( approx 336,000)
- France 6% (288,000)
- Germany 6% (288,000)
- Italy at 5% (240,000)
- Netherlands rounds out the Internationals at 4% with approximately 192,000
- The other countries add up to 244,000
Interest measured by search inquiries by country
I utilised the new Google feature \”Google insights for Search\” to check to see what the level of google search interest from different countries was, in searching for twitter (as adjusted for population) and there were a few surprises.
So what are the rankings?
1. The United Kingdom ranked number 1 with a rating of 100
2. The United States ranked second with 82
3. Ireland with 72
4. Canada with 70
5. Australia is fifth with 65
6. New Zealand comes in with a 50
7. The Netherlands is number 7 with with 41
8. Singapore is ranked 8th with 37
9. Portugal scores 36
10. Norway rounds out the top 10 with 29
Is Twitter a fad or is it the real deal, and will it make a major impact on the Internet world that Google and Facebook have. Going on these numbers its well on its way.
