Indonesia has highest Twitter penetration

Twitter grew its global base by 109 percent in June over the previous year to clock nearly 92.9 million users, where Indonesia had the world's highest penetration rate, according to a comScore report released Thursday.

Some 20.8 percent of online users in Indonesia visited Twitter.com in June, followed by Brazil at 20.5 percent and Venezuela at 19 percent. comScore added that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's decision to join Twitter in late-April had fueled in large part his country's growth.

The Netherlands and Japan rounded out the top five spots at 17.7 percent and 16.8 percent respectively. Southeast Asian economies the Philippines ranked No. 6 with a penetration of 14.8 percent, while Singapore placed No. 9 at 13.3 percent and Malaysia at No. 19 with 7.7 percent.

The comScore survey revealed that Asia-Pacific ranked as the second-fastest growing region climbing 243 percent to 25.1 million Twitter users. Latin America experienced the strongest audience growth, surging 305 percent to 15.4 million.

Users from the Middle-East Africa jumped 142 percent to 5 million, while European Tweeters increased more than 106 percent to 22.5 million. North America, where Twitter has reached a higher maturity level than other regions, saw a growth of 22 percent to nearly 25 million visitors in June.

The comScore survey polled Internet users aged 15 and above from 41 countries who accessed Twitter.com from work or home. The numbers did not include access to Twitter via mobile phones or handhelds and public computers such as Internet cafes.

"Twitter.com has experienced an explosion in global traffic over the past year, establishing itself as one of the most-visited social networking sites across each of the five worldwide regions," Graham Mudd, comScore's vice president of search and media, said in the report.

With nearly three out of four global Internet users accessing social networking sites each month, tweeting is one of the most ubiquitous activities across the Web, Mudd added.

"As more users around the world have become acquainted with connecting and expressing themselves through social media, it has created an environment where new media like Twitter can emerge globally in a relatively short period of time," he said.

More smartphone tweets
The proliferation of smartphones pushed adoption of tweeting on-the-go, led by users in the United States. An average of 8.3 percent of smartphone users in the U.S. per month, translating to 4.2 million, accessed Twitter in June, outpacing Europe's 1.7 million smartphone users who accessed the microblogging site.

These figures only looked at access to Twitter via mobile browsers and excluded usage of Twitter-based apps such as Tweetdeck.

"For applications such as Twitter that function as an instantaneous broadcast medium, the mobile device represents the ideal platform to engage with this content anytime and anyplace," noted Mudd.

As more users turn to smartphones, the pace of mobile tweeting will continue to surge, aided by advanced Web browsing features of the phone, he said.

"While desktop-based Internet usage is still king, mobile Web usage is surging on a global scale placing applications like Twitter at the forefront of that paradigm shift," he added.