Tweeting around the globe

Another quick glimpse of how international social media are: Twitter grew 109% in the past year, comScore says, and “Indonesia, Brazil, and Venezuela led the surge.” Indonesia was No. 1, with 20.8% of Net users there having visited Twitter in June. As for Venezuela’s growth, it was “fueled in large part by President Hugo Chavez’s decision to join Twitter in late April,” comScore reports. Nearly half the world’s Twitter users (44.5 million) are in North America and about a quarter in Europe, followed by Asia-Pacific (7.3 million), Latin America (3.8 million), and Middle East/Africa respectively (2 million). Interestingly, in terms of penetration (percent of Net users who are also Twitter users), the US, where Twitter is based, is 11th. [See also “Twitterers in US and Japan” and Pew/Internet on how Twitter is not particularly popular among US teens (only 8% of 12-to-17-year-old Net users in the US use Twitter.]