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The World’s Most Twitter-Addicted cities

Twitter’s popularity shows no signs of slowing down, as more of the world catches the social media bug. It now boasts more than half a billion accounts, with around 142 million in the US alone. And the site is now available in 33 languages, after adding support for Basque, Czech and Greek.

But where do the most enthusiastic Twitterati live? Some people might be surprised to learn that Jakarta is officially the most Twitter-addicted city. The Indonesian capital is top of the league based on the number of tweets per day.

It’s followed by Tokyo, London and Sao Paolo, pushing New York into fifth place. Other US cities in the top 20 are Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta and Houston.

A recent report by Semiocast, the social media research firm, examined Twitter use around the world. They looked at the number of tweets posted per day in numerous cities and countries, analysing 517 user profiles and more than 1 billion tweets. They found that use is soaring in Indonesia, Japan and Brazil.

It’s interesting to compare this research with figures from 2010, when North American cities dominated the list. Although London was the most active city, the rest of the top five were Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Boston. Now Boston has fallen out of the top 20 cities. San Francisco, where the company is based, is another notable absence.

Other countries are catching up fast.  Brazil saw users soar from 33.3 million to 41.2 million in the first six months of 2012. The number of users in Saudi Arabia has soared by 93 per cent since January, helping make Arabic the 6th most popular language.

The social network is also getting more multilingual. In 2010, it was easy to get by only in English. But now only 39 per cent of tweets are in the language, and this proportion is shrinking.

Twitter has successfully used crowd-sourcing to launch in new languages. It has used a network of around 400,000 volunteers to make itself available in 33 languages. Some recent new additions are Ukrainian and Catalan. It plans to continue to build on this total, choosing languages in response to user requests.

Of course there are some shortcoming to Semiocast’s research. Most Twitter users don’t post their GPS location, so the company had to rely on an analysis of user profiles, time zones and languages, to determine where they were based.

The figures also don’t compare the number of Twitter users to population size. Another study found that the UK has the highest Twitter penetration, with around 39 per cent of the population using the network. Latin American countries are also extremely “socially engaged”, according to research by ComScore. And Chile, Venezuela and Argentina all feature in the top ten countries.

Facebook may be the world’s dominant social network, with close to 1 billion users around the globe. But Twitter seems to be catching up fast in many countries. As more of the world gets connected, it will be interesting to see if its growth continues.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/the-worlds-most-twitter-addicted-cities/