Twitter’s lead engineer for its International team, Matt Sanford, just posted an announcement detailing the microblogging network’s global growth. According to Sanford, over 60% of registered Twitter accounts come from outside the US. The growth in accounts internationally isn’t surprising, considering that we’ve seen Twitter’s worldwide unique visits rise as U.S. traffic plateaus.
Twitter also said that following the availability of its site in Spanish in November, the site saw a 50 percent boost in sign-ups from Spanish speaking countries. It seems that current events and political engagement seem to also precipitate growth for Twitter. Following the earthquake in Chile, signups spiked 1200% and nearly all of those were using Spanish as their language. In Colombia, signups are up 300% after politicians started using the network as a platform to speak to constituents.
India, which is a potentially huge market for Twitter, has seen accounts rise by nearly 100% since the beginning of 2010 because politicians and Bollywood stars have started using the platform to communicate to fans and constituents. Traffic has also grown after a partnership with Bharti Airtel, India’s largest carrier, to ensure that SMS Tweets are sent and received at standard rates.
International growth is also probably attributed to the availability of Twitter in German, Italian, French, which was rolled out late last year. Twitter crowd-sourced much of the work for these translations. Twitter is also available in Japanese.