New research published by Sysmos provides a highly illuminating view of the breakdown of Twitter usage by geography. This research covering the period from Oct to Dec 09 is the second wave of research published by the company. The first was published in Jun 09 and there are some interesting insights in terms of the evolution of Twitter usage over time and well as in the current findings.

According to the research the number one ranking country for Twitter users is the US, representing a staggering 50.9% of the total Twitter population. You could put this down to sheer volume of people in the US, however a quick compare on Internet World Stats shows that North America only represents 14.6% of the worldwide Internet users. So we are seeing a distinct skew towards the US in terms of Internet users adoption of Twitter.

However when it comes to the biggest cities on Twitter in terms of unique users London ranks no. 1, followed by LA, Sao Paulo and then New York. But when it comes to the gift of the gab on Twitter New Yorkers beat everyone else hand down – contributing the greatest volume of tweets than any other city. Some cynics may conclude that this very much reflects how things are in the offline world too ;-)

Also interesting is that according to the research Brazil has shown a huge surge in Twitter users from June to Dec 09 – rising from 2% to 6.73% of the Twitter population and now ranking as the second biggest country on Twitter. Interestingly this is more in line with overall percentage of worldwide Internet users from Latin America which is 10.1% and is in line with recent explosive growth in not only Internet but also and more importantly probably mobile phone usage in Brazil.

Will be interesting to see how these statistics evolve over time – especially from the point of view of levels of representation by country. How long will it be before the Twitter universe begins to parallel the online universe in terms of representation – or will we see some nations such as Brazil and India grow beyond their current online scale fuelled by mobile application usage of Twitter?

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