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Asia on top for ‘tweets’ on Twitter |
July 05, 2010 |
Twitter may be an American creation, but it’s in Asia that the little bird has built its noisiest nest.
Asians today post more on the “micro-blogging” site than North Americans, according to Semiocast, a Paris-based Web research company.
Based on figures compiled by Semiocast, an average of 35 million posts appeared from Asian countries on the site each day in June, or 37 percent of the 96 million “tweets” per day worldwide. North American posts accounted for just 31 percent, a drop from 36 percent three months ago. Asia’s share increased from 31.5 percent in March.
By country, the United States is still on top, followed by Japan, Indonesia, Brazil, and Britain. Korea ranked seventh. Within Asia, Japan had the most to tweet about, followed by Indonesia, Korea and India.
Twitter began offering a Japanese language service in 2008, leading to a Twitter boom in that country some analysts have credited to its use of Japanese characters to deliver more meaning under the site’s 140-character limit.
During the recent Japan-Denmark preliminary World Cup match in South Africa, 3,283 posts appeared per second on the Japanese site, according to the Nielsen Company, a market research firm.
Analyzing the data, Semiocast said the rise of Twitter in Asia was triggered by the spread of smartphones and other mobile communications devices.
In Korea, social networking sites including Twitter and Facebook started to gain in popularity following the release of the Apple iPhone late last year. The release of local smartphones by Samsung and LG and other high-tech devices has boosted the sites’ popularity even more.
An increasing number of local celebrities, politicians and corporations are sending tweets to their “followers,” who sign up to receive up-to-the-minute information.
There are 150 million Twitter subscribers around the world, and an average of 330,000 Internet users subscribe as new members per day.
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