Which countries have the most Twitter users per capita?

Recently web monitoring firm Semiocast published a list of the top 20 countries in number of Twitter accounts.

Not surprisingly US was top with 107 million users, with Brazil coming in second at 33 million and Japan next at just under 30 million.

I am always interested in comparing the degree of social media engagement across countries, so we did a simple analysis to find out the proportion of each country’s population that has a Twitter account, as below.

United Kingdom leads with 39% as many Twitter accounts as people in the country, U.S. somewhat behind at 36%, then followed by Netherlands, Chile, Venezuala, and Japan.

One of the problems with this data is that it only includes the top 20 countries by absolute numbers of Twitter users, so some smaller countries that have strong Twitter usage such as Singapore and Australia are not covered even if their per capita usage may have brought them into the top tier.

It is interesting to see Netherlands come in third, which is reflected in other Semiocast data that found Dutch twitterers to be the most active in the world.

The very high rankings of Chile, Venezuala, Argentina, and Colombia are striking, as they are not usually recognized as Twitter-intensive countries.

Countries such as India, Russia, and Germany feature on the list by virtue of their high populations, but are clearly well down in global rankings in Twitter uptake. India in particular may see more rapid uptake soon.