Twitter Grows Globally But Shrinks In USA

The use of Twitter continues to grow globally, but according to new stats from Sysomos it is not doing so well in the United States.

The number of Twitter users has declined in the United States but grown overseas since June, particularly in Brazil, Indonesia and Germany. Sysomos, which based its results on 13 million unique and active Twitter accounts from 16 October to 16 December, 2009, found that unique US users totalled 50.9 percent.

While this showed a marked decline in US visitors from the company’s June poll, when the US totalled 62 percent, the US is still easily the biggest tweeting country.

Rounding out the top 5 biggest Twitter users are Brazil, which totalled 8.8 percent of unique Twitter users (up from 2 percent in June); the UK at 7.2 percent (down from 7.8 percent); Canada at 4.3 percent (fell from 5.7 percent); and Germany at 2.3 percent (up from 1.6 percent).

US Twitter users are also compulsive tweeters. While the numbers show US Twitter users at roughly 51 percent, these users accounted for 56.6 percent of total tweets.

By comparison, UK users accounted for 8.1 percent of total tweets, compared with 7.2 percent of unique users, while users in Brazil racked up 6.73 percent of total tweets compared with 8.79 percent of unique users.

It would seem Twitter users in the US are more active than many users around the world.

Sysomos also looked at tweeting by cities, and found that London has the biggest population in terms of unique users with 2.08 percent. Los Angeles has 1.63 percent, while Sao Paulo boasts 1.47 percent, New York weighs in at 1.44 percent, followed by Chicago at 1.2 percent.

However, New Yorkers tweet more than citizens in other cities. For the Big Apple, the total number of tweets notched 2.37 percent, followed by London at 2.12 percent, Los Angeles at 2.10 percent, Chicago at 1.46 percent and Atlanta at 1.24 percent.

Interestingly, Sysomos reported that few Twitter users are using Twitter’s geo-location API tool. A paltry 0.23 percent of all Tweets were tagged with geo-location, which works with applications from Foursquare, Gowalla and others.

Twitter meanwhile was busy in the latter half of 2009, banking $100 million (£63 million) in VC funding, introducing Twitter Lists and inking search deals with Microsoft and Google to help make the company profitable. The company acquired Mixer Labs to boost the geolocation API.

The company has also been hinting at its monetization plans and has been seeking to hire monetization experts. The startup’s plans for making money include offering custom business accounts and advertising.