A total of 4.5 million Twitter accounts had been created Russian users as of January 1, 2012 – a three-fold increase over the 1.5 million recorded a year earlier – according to a recent study by Semiocast, a Paris-based social media research company.
This number puts Russia currently in 20th place on Twitter’s gobal map, the study shows, far behind the USA (with 107.7 million accounts), Brazil (33.3 million) and Japan, (29.9 million) – but also trailing such relatively small-market countries as Venezuela, Chile and the Netherlands.
Yet Russian users are “sightly more active than the international average,” noted Semiocast’s Paul Guyot in an exchange with East-West Digital News, with “27% posting at least one tweet and 23% making some other change in their account over four months.”
A study last year by Yandex, the Russian search giant, counted no more than 1 million Twitter users posting in Russian as of July 2011. Russian-speaking users sent 370,000 tweets daily, Yandex said, of which 8% were retweets and about a third replies to other tweets. The average tweet in Russian had 78 characters.
Twitter was founded in 2006, but launched its Russian version only in April 2011.
Tumblr, another global microblogging service with almost 40 million users worldwide, also has a Russian version. But Cnews.ru has quoted Mail.ru Group General Manager Dmitry Grishin as saying only some 10,000 of Tumblr’s users are Russians.
Last month Mail.ru Group launched its own microblogging service, called Futubra, which offers certain functions more advanced than those available on Twitter, EWDN reported.
