There Is A Lot More Than English When It Comes To Twitter

If you think that by tweeting in English you will reach the entire world, you are wrong. Though English is by far the most ‘spoken’ language on Twitter, there are still many other languages on Twitter. French company Semiocast performed an analysis on 2.8 million tweets and found that half of the tweets are in English. Last year that was 75%. Twitter is only fairly recently started introducing international versions of their site, however in many countries the ‘home language’ has been used longer.

The top languages are in a way surprising. The top five languages are English, Japanese, Portuguese, Malay and Spanish. This shows that Twitter is very popular in the far east. Japan accounts for 14% of the messages while Malay languages (Indonesia) reaches until 6%. The high number of Spanish and Portuguese tweets are less surprising with many countries in South America also using these languages.

The research was performed within 48 hours. For two days all the tweets were counted. In that time the researchers found that major European languages like German, Italian and even Dutch are used for about 1% to 2% of all messages. The French seem the least active on Twitter with less than a percent of the messages.

With half of the tweets in another language than English and Tweets now being indexed by search engines it is becoming more and more interesting to ad specific languages to your twitter-efforts if you are targeting any of the languages named above.

Oscar Carreras, SEO Manager at Hotels.com, will be speaking about how they devised and implemented an international Twitter strategy to target markets such as Japan and Brazil at the International Search Summit in May.

source: http://semiocast.com/static/downloads/Semiocast_Half_of_messages_on_Twitter_are_not_in_English_20100224.pdf