Social Media Snippets

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Social media monitoring agency Sysomos has published its second ‘Exploring the Use of Twitter Around the World’ report. 

The report uses data captured between mid-October and mid-November 2009 to produce a top twenty global ranking list for countries based on those with largest share of Twitter users and those with the largest share of activity – i.e. each country’s contribution to the total number of tweets sent on the service. 

While Thailand does not feature in either list Southeast Asian neighbours Indonesia (6th with 2.41%) and Philippines (15th with 1.08%) are included in the top 20 countries based on share of Twitter users. 

Analysing Twitter activity and each, Indonesia is 6th (with 2.34% of the world’s tweets), Singapore is 12th (with 0.88%), Philippines is 13th (with 0.85%) and Malaysia 18th (with 0.47%), Thailand fails to make the top 10.

Finally Sysomos looked at individual cities and their share of users and activity. Jakarta is the sole Southeast Asian representative with 0.58% of Twitter users and 0.8% of Twitter activity. 

Interestingly Jakarta is the highest ranked city in Asia on either list. Tokyo is only other Asian to make an appearance courtesy of its 0.56% of the world’s Twitter users (ranked 20th) though  it does not feature in the world’s top 20 for activity. 

The lack of major Asian presence can be put down to a number of reasons, here are a few. 

Language

English is not spoken as commonly across the region. While Twitter does accommodate non-Roman scripts, much of conversation is in English and therefore of little value to Asia as a whole. 

Competition

For linguistic reasons many countries, like Japan and China, have their own Twitter-like services, therefore reducing the number of Twitter user.

Population distribution

Outside of major global cities in Asia standards of living vary hugely. While there are many British Twitter users outside of London, the same cannot be said of Twitter users in Thailand outside of Bangkok. 

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Based on Sysomos’ report, Indonesia is the Twitter centre of Asia, with most the most users and most tweets sent. Furthermore Jakarta is The Twitter City of Asia with more users and more activity than any other. 

Singapore is also worthy of mention as an Asian Twitter powerhouse. It does not have a lot of users yet it produces enough tweets to rank as one of the most active countries in the world. Malaysia is similar to Singapore but with more users and less tweets it less worthy of note.  

The list goes to show that while Twitter has begun to grow in Thailand, it is nowhere near the size and popularity of Europe or America. Personally, I believe that Twitter has the potential to grow in Thailand although it remains to be seen whether it has the (potential) captive audience to grow into one of the world’s top Twittering nations. 

It is worth mentioning the method of measurement used as extracting information, particular user location data, on Twitter is difficult.

“In doing our research, we discovered that almost no one is using the geo-location API tool that Twitter launched last August, with only 0.23% of all Tweets tagged with geo-location. To determine someone’s location, Sysomos uses proprietary technology to infer geography based on user disclosed information which does not rely on Twitter’s geo-location API.” 

This “proprietary technology” was at the centre of recent discussion (in the comments section of this wearesocial.net post) in which Sysomos sheds a little more light on its measurement. 

Google's number of search results are never accurate. In fact they are often off by as much as 10 times. 

IP addresses are also not a good way to infer geography. And this is why Sysomos does NOT use IP addresses in any way. We use our own technology to infer geography based on what you disclose - and we have bench-marked it to be over 97% accurate.