PH ranks 10th in number of Twitter users

MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines now has 9.5 million registered users in the microblogging site Twitter, a new study showed.

The study by social media monitor Semiocast, which analyzed 517 million Twitter profiles, ranked the Philippines at No. 10, ahead of South Korea, France, Italy and Germany.

However, this figure pales in comparison to the number of Filipinos on the social networking site Facebook.

Officially dubbed the “social media capital of the world” in 2011, the Philippines reportedly has around 93.9% of its 40-million strong Internet population on Facebook.

“This is certainly good news, but, frankly, not really surprising. Filipinos have always been active in social media and we are increasingly using mobile phones to tweet or post on Facebook,” Orlando Vea, chief wireless advisor of Smart Communications Inc., said in a statement.

The United States is still the No. 1 Twitter nation, representing 27.4% of all Twitter users with 141.8 million accounts created before July 1, 2012.

Brazil is at No. 2 with 41.2 million Twitter users, overtaking Japan, which fell to No. 3.

Completing the top 10 are Great Britain at No. 4, followed by (in order) Indonesia, India, Mexico, Canada, Spain and the Philippines.

The study also revealed that users from Jakarta were the most active within all cities ranked by the number of posted tweets. Bandung, Indonesia's second largest metropolitan area, ranked sixth.

Manila wasn't included in the top 20 Twitter cities.

Other Asian cities on the list include: Tokyo at No. 2, Singapore at No. 11, Osaka at No. 13 and Seoul at No. 17.

According to Smart, the country surpassed more progressive countries in terms of social media use “in large part because of the affordability of gadgets and the accessibility of Internet services made available by local telcos.”

Disaster relief

For instance, at the height of Tuesday’s intense rain and flooding all over the country, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos trooped to Twitter to spread critical flood information, as well as to mobilize rescue and relief operations.

“Even as the torrential rains rendered several families stranded and helpless, with flooded homes and without electricity, we saw how people found their mobile phones – and mobile Internet -- especially useful to stay connected, tweeting for help for loved ones stuck elsewhere, and even for complete strangers trapped on their rooftops,” Vea said.

In its own way, Smart has also been very active in social media sites. It boasts of having more than 1.2 million "likes" on Facebook (the most from any Filpino company), over 15,000 friends on Foursquare, and close to 200,000 followers on Twitter all of which, enable the company to further reach out to its loyal subscribers and make sure disaster-response information is widely disseminated and in a timely fashion.