As the largest English speaking country and the home to micro-blogging site Twitter, it is perhaps natural to assume that the U.S would hold the Twitter usage crown. Yet, even though the US leads the way with the highest number of registered Twitter accounts, at nearly 108 million (with 5 million created in December alone), the Netherlands has now been revealed to be the country with the most active users.
The report authored by Semiocast, analyzed over 380 million accounts. Surprisingly, the country with the highest amount of active users is the Netherlands, with 33% posting over the last 3 month period. The Netherlands is even higher in general activity on Twitter with over 50% of users updating their accounts by either following other users, or changing a profile picture. These users, however, do not necessarily comment or post uniquely.By way of comparison, the U.S. represents only 28% of all active users worldwide.
Over 33 million accounts were created in Brazil, placing the country second only after the United States. Japan came in third with nearly 30 million registered accounts, followed by the UK with 23.8 million user profiles and Indonesia with 19.5 million.
Even though Japan ranks third in registered accounts on the microblogging site, that country’s percentage of active Twitter users is higher than the world wide percentage of 27%. 30% of Japanese accounts posted at least one message between 1 September 2011 and 30th November 2011.
By comparison, only 25% of Brazilians posted a message on Twitter within the same timeframe. Japanese also holds the position as the second most used language on Twitter.
The percentages of active users in both countries highlight the surprisingly low amount of active users, with 70% of accounts showing no activity over the course of the last 3 months.
The study seems to show that a large amount of twitter users are observers, merely using the site to discover and consume information but not share or perpetuate ideas of their own. Only a small amount of users on Twitter seem to be the ones creating and sharing content.
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