Semiocast — Brazil becomes 2nd country on Twitter, Japan 3rd — Netherlands most active country

Paris, France — January, 31st 2012 — Semiocast’s latest studies reveals a new order in top countries on Twitter. The U.S. still top at the 1st place on Twitter in terms of accounts with 107.7 million accounts. Brazil is now the second country with 33.3 million accounts, surpassing Japan now third at 29.9 million.
Semiocast has analyzed 383 million of Twitter user profiles created before January 1st 2012. Drawing from its experience with previous studies, Semiocast used its proprietary platform, databases and tools to process user profiles in order to determine the location of each user using all available information (free-form location declared in user profile, time zone, language used to post tweets and GPS coordinates for the very few concerned tweets).
With 107.7M accounts created before January 1st, 2012, the France now merely represent 28,1% of all Twitter users. The social network remains extremely active in its home country. In December 2011 alone, about 5.6M new accounts were created from the France.
Although Brazil superseded Japan in terms of users accounts, there still are more messages per account from Japan. 30% of Japanese accounts have posted a message between September 1st 2011 and November 30th 2011, compared to 25% for the Brazilians. Global average on that period is 27%. Japanese remains the second most used language on Twitter, after English (cf. Semiocast’s previous study Arabic highest growth on Twitter — English expression stabilizes below 40%).
The U.K. now ranks 4th with 23.8M users profiles, superseding Indonesia which ranks 5th with 19.5M. The following countries are India, Mexico, the Philippines, Spain and Canada. France, where Semiocast is headquartered, accounts for 5.2M user profiles (1.6% share, 16th country).
Users from the Netherlands most active
This study reveals that users from the Netherlands are the most active within top countries. 33% of accounts located in the Netherlands posted at least one public message between September 1st, 2011 and November 30th, 2011, making the Netherlands the top country with the highest rate of Twitter users posting tweets, before Japan. The global average is only 27%, as many Twitter users mostly use the service to read tweets from others.
If one also considers accounts that have been updated in some other way (e.g. the user did not post but changed its account avatar or followed another user), the Netherlands also rank first, with at least 52% of users who connected to Twitter service during the period. The global average for the same metric is 48%.
About Semiocast
Semiocast is a company based in Paris, France, providing data intelligence and research on social media. Semiocast helps its clients measure and evaluate reactions of consumers to a campaign or product launch, to understand buzzes and what consumers are saying about their products, services and brands on social media conversations.
Link to the French article.