Are Europeans Really Not Using Twitter?

thenextweb.com

6 points·nickoakland··6 comments

>>Despite the fact that Arabic accounts for only 1.2% of all public tweets, the growth rate over the past year has been a staggering rate of 2,146%

It makes sense that if the usage is very low almost to the point of nil than any growth is going to seem "staggering". i.e. If you go from 1 person using it to 2 people using it then you've just grown 100%!!!

Unless I'm missing something, this article only discusses tweets by language, not geography. Many Europeans use English on social media sites given the cosmopolitan nature of Europe and the likelihood that, if there is one language they have in common with friends from other countries in Europe and abroad, it is English.

I'm guessing there's a few lesser spoken European languages in that "all others" category.

Also, those numbers actually suggest that by far the most active language group (relatively speaking) on twitter are the Dutch speakers, who are almost all Europeans. Actually, I thought the number and growth for Dutch had to be a mistake, but other sources [1] do suggest the same trends. I'm still sceptical about the numbers though, especially German being hardly used seems at odds with older data about twitter usage [2].

[1]http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/4/T... [2]http://blog.sysomos.com/2010/01/14/exploring-the-use-of-twit...

Yes and no. No: in France at least, very few people use it. Yes: those who do use it in France, use it to talk people internationally (ie. in English).

So what do the French use for talking to fellow Frenchmen? (Like QQ for Chinese).

This is correct. A lot of Twitter users from Germany I know tweet in English to get in contact with people from all over the world.

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