While there are questions about the ability of Facebook to grow in future, Comscore has found that Twitter use has more than doubled over the past year.   Comscore’s stats (via Marketing Charts) also confirm the on-going trend of Twitter becoming less of an a US dominated, or even anglophone network.



While Twitter growth in North America was a respectable 22% from June 2009 to June 2010, in Europe it was 106%, in Asia Pacific 243% and Latin America 305%.  Overall, North American unique visitors counted for 27% of the 92.8 million unique visitors.

Though we’re not exactly comparing like with like, it is still useful to look at the Sysomos research from January, which showed the US accounting for 50% of Twitter’s user base.


Surprisingly, the countries with the highest % of Twitter penetration as a proportion of each country’s Internet population are Indonesia (20.8%), Brazil (20.5%) and Venezuela (19%).    Comscore says that Venezuela’s Twitter enthusiasm can directly be traced to Hugo Chavez setting up an account.  By comparison, Twitter penetration in the US was 11.9%, while in the UK  it was 10.9%
Mobiles drive Twitter use
Comscore says that Twitter’s growth in the US, UK, France, Spain and Italy is driven by Smartphone users.

This chimes in with an article posted up on GigaOm on Friday, showing that at weekends in particular, Twitter use from mobiles jumps - showing that people are still using the network when away from their desks and integrating into their online lives.

In his article Om Malilk talks about a study done by New York based SocialFlow, which looked at one (client) Twitter account with 500k followers.  On Saturdays, the % of clicks from mobile devices hits a peak at 41%.

Of course, 93 million global unique users, does not mean the same as 93 million regular users.  There is still the research from RJ Metrics showing that 83% of Twitter accounts are dormant every month, and that a base of committed users (often active in other social media / media channels) make up for the majority of activity.

Though the growth rates are certainly impressive, there’s as yet no new evidence that Twitter’s churn rates have significantly improved, with the service hitting real mainstream web adoption.