French social media research and data intelligence firm, Semiocast, has just put out a brand new study revealing that Twitter has finally garnered its 500 millionth user, taking the world of Tweeters to half a billion.
While that’s still almost half a billion less than Facebook, it’s still a mighty milestone to have made, with 140 million of those Tweeters in the US, and the rest around the world.
The study used “geolocation analysis” to analyse “517 million Twitter user profiles created before July 1, 2012”, while looking at a “sample of 1.058 billion public tweets” tweeted in the month of June 2012 alone, and saw stats like slowing growth in Korea and Japan, despite Japan remaining “one of the most active countries” for Twitter use.
Meanwhile, the “top three cities by number of tweets” during June 2012 were “Jakarta, Tokyo and London.”
Given that Semiocast notes that, despite 2.5 years having passed since Twitter offered the capability to “post tweets with GPS co-ordinates”, that “only 0.77% of public tweets” – thus forcing Semiocast to use its proprietary tools to determine location by looking at the user profile, time zone, language used to post tweets etc.
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Brazil’s “two largest cities” rank among the top 20 tweeting cities – with Brazil in 2nd place “in terms of number of user profiles in January”, while Japan “remains the second most active country in terms of posted tweets” with 10.6% of all public tweets coming from Japan and the Japanese representing “6.7% of all Twitter users”.
Jakarta is the most active Twitter city, Arabic usage continues to grow on Twitter and the social messaging service is only going from strength to strength.
For the rest of the amazing details and city-by-city stats, please see Semiocast’s study results here.
Clearly, 500 million/half a billion Tweeters is still just the beginning, with the full billion user mark still to come!
