USA and Kuwait lead the Twitter pack
It is well known that Americans love Twitter, in fact, they account for 24.3 percent of the Twitter population, according to Peer Reach, and while Japan accounts for 9.3 percent, Indonesia for 6.5 percent, the UK for 5.6 percent and Brazil for 4.0 percent, Dirk Singer at Lies, Damned Lies & Statistics dug a little deeper.
Singer poked around and discovered that when you look at this same data on a per capita basis, Kuwait actually has the most active Twitter population, not the U.S., with one in three people in Kuwait having a Twitter account. Wow.
North Eastern University research has unveiled that Kuwait’s per capita use on Twitter is followed by The Netherlands, Brunei, the UK, and of course, the United States.
“The story about social media use increasing in the Arab world isn’t of course new,” noted Singer. “An article by Loic Moisand of Synthesio on Social Fresh has some great statistics about social media in the Middle East and North Africa, including the fact that 48% of social media communication in the region is still in English (compared to 45% in Arabic), and that 88% of the Middle East’s online population uses social networks every day.”
The relevance of emerging markets
Brands of all size should be paying attention to the emerging social media markets, which it is said are filled with people that take an active content consumption role – they’re hungry for it. One report notes that 12 in 14 countries where people are most likely to share “most things” or “everything” happen to be in developing markets. For example, Saudi Arabia was found to be the most likely to share “everything” or “most things,” with 60.0 percent of online users professing to be frequent sharers, compared to America’s measly 15.0 percent.
So what does this mean? Should you change your entire strategy? No, but if you’re ignoring the emerging markets, you could be missing out. If you’re a real estate agent and you work with clients relocating, perhaps establishing a presence abroad is a good idea. Maybe you sell jewelry and no one in America is really sharing your work – try networking online in Saudi Arabia.
You get the idea – look to the emerging markets for an engaged audience – they’re hungry for it!
