Twitter passes 500 million user accounts milestone
Research firm Semiocast has released a report that claims Twitter reached the 500 million accounts milestone in June.
The study analyzed 517 million Twitter user profiles, as well as samples of 1.058 billion Tweets posted in June. This figure does not include updates from users that have their Tweets set to private.
Leading the way was the United States, with 141.8 million Twitter accounts created before July 1, 2012. This figure represents 27.4% of all Twitter accounts. This is actually a fall on previous studies by Semiocast, where the US accounted for 28.1% of all accounts.
According to the report, the US will still be the dominant Twitter nation for a long time, but other countries are experiencing faster growth rates.
Coming in behind the Stars and Stripes was Brazil, with 41.2 million accounts. This was a big leap from 33.3 million in January. The South American nation now accounts for 8% of all Twitter accounts, but only 6.6% of total Tweets posted.
Rounding out the top five in Japan with 34.1 million, the United Kingdom with 32.2 million, and Indonesia with 29.4 million. Australia does not rank in the top 20 Twitter nations in a number of accounts, according to the Semiocast report.
Japanese remains the second most used language on Twitter, with 10.6% of all Tweets coming from the nation, despite Japan only representing 6.7% of all accounts globally.
The report also looked at location-based Tweets, where users have opted to add a GPS time-stamp of where they are posting from. Despite the feature being available for two and a half years, only 0.77% of Tweets in June used the feature.
