The first two installments of this series on Twitter were both about the rapid but lastly plateauing growth as well as how Twitter is actually being used. This third and last part will try to show who is using Twitter and where they are from.

The data collection for this is rather difficult: Twitter accounts do not have a clear country-association. There is a way to enter a “location” but this is a free text field, which is only used by a small number of users and which usually contains nonsense. I decided to put the content of the last posted Tweet through a speech-recognition-API and use that result. This may not be a 100% accurate and it will also not work on those accounts that have not (yet) posted any Tweets, but thanks to the vast amount of data collected, the accuracy should be high enough.

Languages Used
The first evaluation looks at the language used. All in all, I was able to discern 64 different languages, including some “Internet-exotics” such as Tamil, Khmer as well as Esperanto. The following shows the top-10 as well as the amount of Twitter accounts in these languages.


English is, not surprisingly, far ahead of other languages, followed by Portuguese (where Brazil should make up a major share of this) and Spanish. German accounts take the fourth spot with 1,3%, followed by the Netherlands with 0,8% – if we take the total populations in account, it would seem that Twitter use is considerably more widespread with our neighbors.

German Twitter-Accounts
As shown above, 1,3% of all Twitteraccounts are in German. This makes a projected 870.000 accounts – quite a few more than I would have guessed. The following shows an evaluation as to when these accounts were registered:


This about mirrors the worldwide growth statistic. Only in September do we have a small deviation: this could be due to the increased media coverage during the election. Last month saw a noticeably drop in newly registered accounts in German, it will be interesting to see how the next few month will fare.

Usage of Accounts in German
So how are German accounts doing, compared to the rest of the Twitterverse? The next diagram show the average number of Tweets, amount of followers as well as the number of friends for German accounts and for the rest of Twitter:



We are definitely busy – the average, German account sports nearly 50% more Tweets. Sadly this is upset by the fact, that, compared to the international average, a lot less people are reading them: while the Twitter-average is 64, accounts that are in German only have an average of 48 followers. Though the number of friends does not show these large distinctions.


Part I: Twitter: Growth
Part II: Twitter: Usage
Part III: Twitter: International Usage