smartphones are responsible for most of Twitter’s growth in the US and Europe

comScore’s report on Twitter’s stratospheric worldwide growth shows smartphones are responsible for most of the growth in the US and Europe

An analysis of Twitter usage via mobile for the six mobile markets currently reported by comScore (UK, US, France, Germany, Spain and Italy) revealed that Twitter is as you would expect gaining adoption among smartphone users. The UK experienced the strongest penetration in Europe with 5.8%, followed by Germany with 3.1% and France with 2.1%.

In the US, 8.3% of smartphone users (4.2 million people) accessed Twitter.com in a month via the browser on their mobile devices, outpacing each of the European markets.

	Twitter Audience	% of Smartphone users
United States	4,246,000	8.30%
Europe	1,681,000	2.80%
United Kingdom	793,000	5.80%
Germany	322,000	3.10%
Italy	227,000	1.40%
France	173,000	2.10%
Spain	165,000	1.50%

Table – Twitter Penetration Among Mobile Smartphone Users 3 Month Avg. Ending June 2010 Source: comScore MobiLens

“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,” added Mr. Mudd. “The advanced web browsing features of smartphones enable this behaviour, making it likely to accelerate as these devices gain continued adoption. 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.”

When you look at Twitter’s total audience, it’s still seeing good growth. From June 2009 to June 2010 visits to the site grew by 109% to nearly 93 million, however the actual Twitter usage figure is probably much higher as this figure is just pure Twitter.com usage  and doesn’t include Twitter access from apps like TweetDeck.

A surprising statistic from the results are the countries with the highest Twitter penetration – the ratio of Twitter users to internet users –  Indonesia has the highest penetration, with 20.8% of Internet users in the country visiting Twitter, followed by Brazil and Venezuela, with Venezuela’s growth fuelled in large part by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s decision to join Twitter in late April.

“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,” said Graham Mudd, comScore vice president, search & media. “Today nearly 3 out of 4 global Internet users access social networking sites each month, making it one of the most ubiquitous activities across the web. 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.”

An analysis of the five major global regions revealed that Latin America experienced the strongest audience growth, surging 305% to 15.4 million users. Asia Pacific ranked as the second-fastest growing region, climbing 243% to 25.1 million visitors. The Middle-East Africa jumped 142% to 5 million visitors, while Europe soared 106% to 22.5 million visitors. North America, where Twitter has reached a higher maturity level than other regions, saw a growth of 22% to nearly 25 million visitors in June.

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