Twitter passed the 500 million user market in June 2012 according to a report from French analysts Semiocast but alarmingly for the micro-blogging site only 27% (170million) are active users.
Active users were classed as accounts that were modified over a three-month period, including changes of avatar, subscribing to a new follower or tweeting. “We believe this is close to a monthly login rate,” said Paul Guyot, founder of Semiocast. The report could be damaging for Twitter’s moves to monetise the platform with sponsored and rich content tweets have largely been seen as successful to date but this report could be damaging if advertisers believe Twitter’s users are mostly inactive. However under this definition users who just log on to browse tweets without changing their account are not deemed ‘active’ but may well be consuming sponsored tweets.
The Netherlands has the highest proportion of active Tweeters with 33%, India has the lowest active rate of 19% but activity doesn’t appear to be linked to a country’s development as Germany are third lowest and Indonesia third highest.
The US still has by far and away the most users with 141.8 million (28% active). Brazil is a distant second with 41.2 million, followed by Japan and the UK. Jakarta just pipped Tokyo to the title of the most active city by number of tweets posted in June. New York was the highest US city in fifth place.
Semiocast analysed 517 million Twitter user profiles created before July 1st 2012 as well as a sample of 1.058 billion public tweets posted from June 1st to June 30th 2012 for the report.
