Twitter.com is now used by 93 million people worldwide, according to the latest data from comScore. Bear in mind that this is data based purely on visits to the Twitter website, rather than access from third-party applications, and that comScore's metrics are more indicative than accurate. But patterns on growth are particularly interesting.
Photo by Rosaura Ochoa. Some rights reserved.
Figures for June show the number of monthly users up 109% from June 2009 to 92,874,000 with the biggest growth in Latin America and Asia Pacific. Latin America has 15.4m users and Asia Pacific 25.1m, while Europe has 22.5m and North America 24.9m.
Growth was slowest in North America, at 22% year on year, where Twitter is already established. Latin America saw traffic to the Twitter site increase 305% and Asia Pacific 243%.
Despite the high profile of Twitter in English-speaking countries its penetration by country was outperformed by new markets. In New Zealand 7.5% of web users access the site, compared with 10.9% in the UK and 11.9% in the US.
Indonesia proportionally has the highest level of use with 20.8%, Brazil with 20.5% and Venezuela with 19% - possibly spurred on by President Hugo Chavez's recent enthusiasm for the platform.
Again, these figures do not include access from apps like Echofon, Tweetie (now Twitter's official app) or TweetDeck, but comScore does have figures for Twitter.com access on smartphones: In the US, 8.3% of smartphone users access the site, with 5.7% in the UK and 3.4% in Germany.
comScore's Graham Mudd, vice president for search and media, said 75% of web users now access social networking sites each month. ""That makes it one of the most ubiquitous activities on the web. As users around the world have become acquainted with connecting and expressing themselves through social media it has created an environment where new media like twitter can emerge globally in a relatively short space of time."
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