These Are The Most Twitter-Crazy Countries In The World, Starting With Saudi Arabia (!?)

In the wake of Twitter's IPO, we wanted to know which countries had the most Twitter-crazy populations.

Was it the U.S., Twitter's home market, or another tech-savvy country like Singapore or the UK?

So at BI Intelligence we analyzed the data to see what percentage of different countries' online populations actually used Twitter.

That yielded some surprises:

• An amazing 41% of the online population in Saudi Arabia uses Twitter, a higher percentage than anywhere else in the world. Indonesia and the Philippines were close.
• Almost one-third of online audiences in India use Twitter. India, with 36.6 million people on the social network, is also Twitter's third-largest market right after the U.S.
• 14 countries - including Japan, the UK, South Africa, and Turkey - have heavier Twitter usage than the social network's home market, the U.S.
• 84.4 million Chinese Internet users report having used Twitter thanks to various hacks despite the fact that it's blocked in the country (along with just about every other Western social media service).

We also looked at how big Twitter's audience was overall in each country, in the blue column. The data was provided to BI Intelligence by Global Web Index, which conducts quarterly online surveys in each country.

What are the growth opportunities for Twitter? According to Twitter's own forecasts, management expects user growth to come largely from Argentina, France, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa.

However, we know that Twitter's user growth is tied closely to mobile growth, so we see enormous potential for the social network in Brazil, Vietnam, and India.

This analysis is from a new report from BI Intelligence, in which we compare the world's largest social networks in two ways. First, we evaluate the biggest properties side-by-side in terms of total audience size. Then we analyze the markets where each has the most growth potential, and their demographics in terms of country-of-origin.

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