South Africa Tenth On Twitter

According to a recent report by Canadian research company Sysomos, South Africa has become the tenth largest twitter user in the world.

According to the report, SA accounts for 0.85% of the total global use of the popular micro-blogging platform, with Japan coming in at 11th place with 0.71%, the Philippines 12th with 0.64%, and China 13th with 0.49%.

It’s scarcely surprising that the United States ranks first with 62.14% of global Twitter users hailing from there, followed by the UK at 7.87%, Canada itself at 5.69% and Australia in fourth place with 2.8%.

Explosive Growth

Twitter started out as a small, unimportant side-project in 2006, at it’s San Francisco home base. In just over three years, its user base has grown to such an extent that today the site receives 55 million unique visitors every month. (467 500 of which are from South Africa.)

And it’s growth can be most easily seen by the fact that, according to Sysomos, 72.5% of users joined Twitter in the first five months of 2009. This is in line with the recent rapid social networking growth which has been seen in all such mediums.

The study analysed publicly available information from 11.5 million Twitter accounts, to gain an overview of the site in terms of use, growth and demographics.

“While Twitter’s growth has been well documented, we wanted to put the spotlight on how people use Twitter, as well as identify many of the key trends in their backgrounds, demographics and activity,” said Nick Koudas, co-founder and chief executive of Sysomos.

Twitter Stats

* 85% of users tweet less than once a day.
* 21% have never posted a tweet.
* 93% of users have less than 100 followers.
* 92 % of users follow less than 100 people.
* 5% of Twitter users are responsible for 75% of all tweets.
* 50% of all tweets are posted from tools other than the Twitter website.
* 53% of Twitter users are women.
* 0.29% of users follow more than 2,000 people.

Social Networking As Marketing

This growth and popularity have been particularly interesting to marketers. In fact, although only 0.29% of users follow more than 2,000 people on Twitter, 15% of self-identified marketers on Twitter follow more than 2,000 users.

The question that remains of course, is how useful social media marketing actually is.

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Twitter Trends South Africa

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