If you are an active Twitter user, you would be disappointed to know that not many Indians are on Twitter. A recent study by PeerReach – a Twitter tool that analyses your connections and interactions to determine your interests, expertise and who is most relevant for you – reveals that India ranks at the 21st position in a list of 23 countries in the world having more than 800,000 active Twitter users.
In fact, the unlikely contender who tops the list is Saudi Arabia, while USA is at the 8th position!
In a graph depicting the Twitter penetration per country, where penetration is defined as the number of monthly active tweeting users relative to the total amount of internet users in that country, Saudi Arabia tops the list with over 33% active Twitter users. The country to follow next, Indonesia is quite far with 19% active users. Twitter penetration in India is just about 1%, which is in common with the last two countries on the list – Germany and Nigeria.
Interestingly, the graph throws light on three things to help understand Twitter usage better:
1) The Top five countries are non English speaking countries – Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Spain, Venezuela and Argentina.
2) Both the top listed countries, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia are known for the fact that most internet users don’t have a PC; they access the internet through mobile.
3) China is not listed because Twitter is banned from China, the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo has no competition.
While Twitter has been cracking many ways to boost the number of users in India, it has also raised concerns regarding the scope of revenues it can make in India, at the time of filing the pre-IPO S-1. A majority of the users in the country are accessing the company’s products and services either through feature phones with limited functionality, or through desktop applications, which makes it difficult for Twitter to offer full features that are possible only on smartphones.