Some data on Twitter followers

Twopcharts is a website that started two years ago to find interesting Twitter users in the Dutch language. Gradually this was expanded, and the website is now tracking Twitter users in 11 languages. In addition to these languages it is also tracking the most followed Twitter users around the globe, which is dominated by people who tweet mostly or occasionaly in the English language. With the vast amount of historical data that is available, interesting things can be done to analyse Twitter use in the different language groups. For the purpose of this blogpost an analysis was made of the number of followers that the most popular Twitter users have by language. For each language group the average amount of followers was caclulated for the Top-1000 accounts at the end of June 2010 and 2011. The results of these calculations are the following:

The numbers in the table clearly show how fast Twitter has grown in the last year. The 1,000 most followed acounts in the world now have an average amount of followers of 1.2 million. In the middle of March the Global top-1000 reached a combined total of 1 billion followers, which means an average of 1 million followers each.

The second largest language is Portuguese, with an average number of followers of almost 196 thousand. The popularity of the Portuguese language is almost entirely caused by the popularity of Twitter in Brazil.
The third language, with an average of almost 154 thousand followers, is Spanish. From the Spanish Twopcharts it can be observed that Spanish tweeting Twitter users come from a wide variety of locations like Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela.
With an average of more than 84 thousand followers for the Top-1000 accounts, Twitter is also extremely popular in Indonesia.

Disclaimer: The table only shows languages tracked by Twopcharts. Other languages may or may not be more widely used than the ones represented here. For example the Arabic language is only tracked since March 2011. At the end of June the average number of followers for the Arabic Top-1000 accounts was about 11 thousand. Other languages, like Japanese, are also very popular, but are currently not tracked by Twopcharts.