Thanks to updated global Twitter statistics from social media business intelligence firm Sysomos (see initial results that put Indonesia and Jakarta top in Asia here),  I can reveal Asia’s most active countries and their share of voice on Twitter.

The statistics are based on total number of tweets sent between 16 October and 16 December 2009, and take into account 13 million accounts that were active during the period.

Twitter: Most Active Countries In Asia

  1. Indonesia – 2.34% share of voice [6th overall]
  2. Japan – 1.47% share of voice [8th overall]
  3. India – 0.97% share of voice [11th overall]
  4. Singapore – 0.88% share of voice [12th overall]
  5. Philippines – 0.85% share of voice [13th overall]
  6. Malaysia – 0.47% share of voice [18th overall]
  7. Thailand – 0.30% share of voice [25th overall]
  8. China – 0.23% share of voice [30th overall]
  9. South Korea – 0.23% share of voice [31st overall]

Thailand is positioned just outside the top 20, I’m predicting Twitter will continue to grow in the country so it is likely to rank higher in the next report.

As mentioned before Singapore must be mentioned for ranking alongside countries with vastly greater populations, the country has one of the highest Twitter usage per person rations in Asia, let alone the rest of the world.

As blogged in response to Sysomos’ initial findings, there are three reasons why Thailand and other Asian countries use Twitter less than their Western counterparts.

Language

English is not spoken as commonly across the region. While Twitter does accommodate non-Roman scripts, much of conversation is in English and therefore of little value to Asia as a whole.

Competition

For linguistic reasons many countries, like Japan and China, have their own Twitter-like services, therefore reducing the number of Twitter user.

Population distribution

Outside of major global cities in Asia standards of living vary hugely. While there are many British Twitter users outside of London, the same cannot be said of Twitter users in Thailand outside of Bangkok.

The effects of competing platforms in Asia is illustrated by Jersey, an island between Britain and France with just a population of 91,626 Jersey, being more active on Twitter than either China and South Korea despite the huge differences in population.

Sysomos also provided more details of Twitter’s top cities though there are no additional Asian cities featured leaving Jakarta (ranked 13th with 0.58% of Twitter users) and Tokyo (ranked 15 with 0.56% of the world’s Twitter users) as the region’s only representatives.