Cape Town - Can't live without Twitter? Can't go through your day without tweeting about it? Well, give yourself a little pat on the back, because you have helped to tweet South Africa into the 10th spot of the world's top Twitter countries.Yes, go on and tweet it: South Africa has become the 10th largest user of Twitter in the world.
According to Canadian research company Sysomos, South African Twitter users make up 0.85% of total online Twitter interaction, beating Japan (0.71%), the Philippines (0.64%) and China (0.49%) to a spot in the top 10.
The US is the winner by far with 62.14% of the world's users, followed by the UK (7.87%), Canada (5.69%) and Australia (2.8%).
Twitter attracts around 55 million unique visitors worldwide per month - 0.85% of this amounts to 467 500 SA visitors per month.
Since starting out as a side project in March 2006 in San Francisco, the popular social networking and micro-blogging site Twitter experienced explosive growth, attracting celebrity users such as Oprah, and a growing mountain of media and blog coverage.
In fact, according to Sysomos's study, 72.5% of all users joined Twitter during the first five months of 2009.
Sysomos analysed information disclosed on 11.5 million Twitters accounts to take an "extensive snapshot" of Twitter "that goes far beyond anything done to document Twitter's use, growth and demographics".
"While Twitter's growth has been well documented, we wanted to put the spotlight on how people use Twitter, as well as identify many of the key trends in their backgrounds, demographics and activity," said Nick Koudas, Sysomos' co-founder and chief executive in a press release. news24.com
Posted by HWB Communications, Cape Town's premier PR agency specialising in crisis communications & media relations in South Africa
