Report Says Japan Very Active on Twitter, But Among Slowest in Growth

Image: japanese.ruvr.ru

French research group Semiocast has released an interesting report showing the top countries and top cities in terms of Twitter accounts. Perhaps the most stunning figure is that the microblogging service surpassed half a billion total user accounts in June of this year [1].

The US tops all countries, way out front with over 140 million Twitter accounts, comprising over 27 percent of all user profiles, but after that things get interesting. Fast-growing Brazil has overtaken Japan for the second spot, and Asian nations Indonesia and India also rank high in fifth and sixth respectively.

While Japan loves Twitter, as we have noted before, Semiocast points at the country’s slow growth of 17 percent in six months. But at the same time, Japanese-speaking users are second only to English in terms of the most active languages.

In terms of growth, the only country that was slower than Japan was South Korea which only grew 16 percent. This makes sense as both nations have very little room to grow in comparison to up-and-coming developing regions like India and Indonesia. This is part of the reason why we’re seeing so many Japanese internet companies looking to overseas markets recently.

Looking at the top cities listed, Jakarta ranks as number one, followed by Tokyo in the second position. Indonesia is also well represented by Bandung in sixth. Incidentally, Bandung is the site when we plan to hold our Startup Asia Hackathon in October, and we encourage you to attend and Tweet as much as you want!