In new data
released Thursday, comScore said Twitter is gaining ground among smartphone owners, with 8% of high-end phone users in the U.S. tweeting away. But that level of
penetration (4.2 million people) still seems quite low given Twitter has 100 million users worldwide. Uptake among smartphone users in Europe is even lower, at 2.8%.
Isn't most Twitter use, at
least in the U.S, already on mobile devices? The comScore report makes it sound as if the idea of using Twitter on their mobile phone had just occurred to people: "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," said Graham Mudd, comScore vice president, search
& media, in a statement.
Well, duh. The 140-character limit was inspired by text-messaging, so mobile is a natural fit.
More surprising is that Twitter finds its highest proportion of
users not in the U.S.(11.9%) but in Indonesia (20.8%), followed closely by Brazil (20.5%) and Venezuela (19%). With Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez joining Twitter in late April, comScore said
Twitter.com penetration in the country spiked 4.8 percentage points in a few months. Does that make it the official microblogging service of Venezuela?
Twitter use has grown fastest across
Latin America a whole over the last year, jumping 305% to 15.4 million monthly unique visitors as of June. Asia Pacific was the second, climbing 243%to 25.1 million visitors, followed by the
Middle-East/Africa, up 142% to 5 million visitors, and Europe, increasing 106% to 22.5 million.
In North America, where Twitter has a more mature user base, use grew 22% to nearly 25 million
visitors. Twitter.com had 93 million visitors overall in June, more than double the total a year ago. (That doesn't include usage of Twitter-based applications such as TweetDeck.)