Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg may no longer be worried about Twitter and its impressive growth rate – and he shouldn’t be – but that won’t keep the micro-sharing service from continuing to boast impressive growth numbers all around the world.
Online analytics firm comScore noted Twitter’s overall continued growth, even based on incomplete data (third-party client users aren’t included in its numbers), and now Pingdom is doing its share by pointing out where exactly Twitter’s staggering international expansion is happening right now. The short version: just about everywhere.
Pingdom took a look at Google Trends for Websites traffic data for Twitter.com to see where the service is experiencing the fastest growth in terms of monthly usage. Again, that means its findings are far more fit for deducing overall trends than they are able to accurately detail Twitter’s user numbers, since a lot of people use desktop and mobile clients for tweeting.
For your information, Twitter COO Dick Costolo at the beginning of this month said they are currently at 190 million users, who are collectively posting some 65 million tweets per day. And last April, Twitter’s lead engineer for its International team, Matt Sanford, said over 60% of registered Twitter accounts were already coming from outside U.S. borders.
Anyway, these are the regions Pingdom says Twitter’s traffic curve is pointing sharply upwards the most:
Latin America
The fastest growth, according to Pingdom, is in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela. Notably, the real turning point seems to have been around January 2010 for all those countries. We’re not sure why – it would have been more logical to see those jumps occur in November 2009, when Twitter was made available in Spanish.
As Pingdom points out, those five countries represent a potential audience of about 150 million Internet users, based on stats provided by Internet World Stats.
Asia
A second region where Twitter seems to be experiencing quite a boost is in Asia, especially in Eastern Asia, accounting for three out of the four top countries: India, Japan (where Twitter actively bolsters its presence with an office and custom ad deals), South Korea and Taiwan. Countries like Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia also seem to be on the rise.
Pingdom pegs the total number of Internet users in the four top countries at some 230 million (about the same as the United States).
Europe and Russia
In Europe, too, Twitter seems to be attracting an increasing amount of visitors to its website, particularly in Italy, Spain and Russia. These three countries have a combined 104 million Internet users, claims Pingdom.
In conclusion: Twitter’s continued growth is undeniable, and we’ve long known this is a global phenomenon unhindered by borders or even languages. As Twitter expands its global footprint through partnerships with mobile carriers and translating its service into more languages, the service is poised for even more growth in the years to come, aided also by increasing smartphone sales and the roll-out of potent Internet and mobile data network infrastructure.
Million dollar question: will Twitter’s own infrastructure be able to sustain this growth in the long run? We’ve all seen what happened with the World Cup stampede, and it wasn’t pretty.
Pingdom tried to pinpoint which countries stand to drive Twitter’s growth the most by looking at the sharpest traffic curves, but if anything the data researched shows that Twitter is gaining ground pretty much everywhere.
How long until Twitter reaches its Big Hairy Audacious Goal of becoming the pulse of the planet with 1 billion users?