Twitter Takes Off In Japan

If you’re looking to tap into the Japanese market through social media, look no further than Twitter.

The Twitter team is particularly focus in key markets like Japan. Hard work and intelligent business decisions have finally paid off as Twitter emerged as the most widely used social site in Japan, surpassing Mixi and Facebook.

In fact, the Japanese’s love for Twitter had already shown signs when Uniqlo’s lucky line campaign went wildly viral, dominating the trending list top spot for days!

The proportion of Japanese Internet users who belong to Twitter is 16.3 percent, surpassing the 9.8 percent of American Internet users who have joined the service. San Francisco’s Twitter and Japan’s top social-networking site, Mixi, have been running neck-and-neck with monthly visitors between 9 million and 10 million, but in April Twitter squeaked past Mixi, according to ratings agency Nielsen Online.

In contrast, only 3 percent of Japanese Internet users are on Facebook, compared with 62 percent in the United States, according to Nielsen. MySpace has also failed to take off in Japan, at less than 3 percent of Net users versus 35 percent in the United States, according to comScore Inc.

Twitter estimates that people in Japan write nearly 8 million tweets a day, about 12 percent of the global total. Data from Tweet Sentiments, a Web site that analyzes tweets, show that Japanese are sometimes tweeting more frequently than Americans.

“Japan is enjoying the richest and most varied form of Twitter usage as a communication tool,” says Daisuke Tsuda, 36, a writer with more than 65,000 followers for his tweets.

“It’s playing out as a rediscovery of the Internet.”

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