Despite Twitter’s significant drops in stock prices and an underwhelming initial acquisition of users this year, there may be hope for the social network still. In the current global forecast for Twitter, numbers show that its Asian audience will increase by nearly 25% this year, and that by 2018 more than 40% of Twitter users will be located in the Asia-Pacific region, according to data released today by eMarketer.
Using more than 90 sources, including Twitter traffic data from research and regulatory agencies, internet and mobile adoption trends and country-specific demographics and socioeconomic factors, eMarketer identified the number of times individual users logged in or accessed Twitter monthly.
The findings demonstrate that Twitter will see substantial growth this year at 24.4%, landing it 227.5 million total users around the world. The social network is expected to continue to grow, reaching 400 million users worldwide and maintaining a double-digit growth rate at 10.7%.
The projected growth can be attributed to the surge in Twitter’s Asia-Pacific user base, which is not only increasing steadily, but has also surpassed the total number of users in North America and Western Europe, despite the ban on Twitter in China. The Asia-Pacific region will account for 32.8% of Twitter users worldwide in 2014, with 23.7% of users in North America and 16.8% in Western Europe. At this rate, eMarketer estimates that the Asia-Pacific user base will comprise 40.1% of total users worldwide in 2018 and could be even higher if China lifts the ban by then.
eMarketer also analyzed Twitter users by country, showing that the rise in Twitter users in emerging markets like India and Indonesia is key to the region’s growth. This year, growth in India will reach as high as 61.7% and 56.9% in Indonesia, resulting in the two countries gaining the third- and fourth-largest Twitter user bases in the world at 18.1 million and 15.3 million, respectively.
While the number of Twitter users in the U.S. continues to grow, the increases in larger regions around the world will in time overwhelm the U.S. user base, decreasing its share of the global user base to single digits. As early as 2015, the U.S. will account for just 9.1% of total Twitter users and expected to drop to 6.4% in 2018, according to eMarketer. For now, however, the U.S. remains the greatest individual country in terms of the number of Twitter users, representing 20% of total Twitter users.
After the tough year it’s had with decreased share prices, its slow start to gaining active users and investor worries, this is good news for Twitter.
