Based on eMarketer’s recent forecast, Twitter is being driven not by North America, which holds less than one quarter of Twitter users, but by Asia-Pacific region including the countries of Indonesia, India, and Japan. Even without China, due to their ban on Twitter and “microblogging service’s blanket ban,” this region holds nearly one third of global Twitter users.
Taking a closer look at the region we find that Japan is the largest Twitter marketer with 26.1% of the Twitter users, while India has 20.5% and Indonesia comes in third.
However, eMarketer estimates that Indonesia and India gained the most Twitter users worldwide this year and all three countries are expected to “surpass in absolute numbers over the next couple of years.”
eMarketer expects that Asia-Pacific as a whole will account for more Twitter users worldwide than any other region.
Twitter penetration rates as a percentage of the internet population are highest in Japan, Indonesia and South Korea, though as a share of the population in each country, penetration is lower, with a high of 15.3% in Japan and 1.5% in India. However, “nearly two in five social network users in Japan use Twitter at least monthly, on the high end, and even in lowest-ranked India, 15.0% of social networkers are on Twitter.”
