Top 10 Cities by number of posted tweets

Ahlan Wa Sahlan! Arabic is exploding on Twitter – and a prime proof of this is the fact that Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh has been ranked among the Top 10 cities by the number of posted tweets.

The number of Arabic tweets has simply exploded on Twitter especially after the microblogging website launched its Arabic version in March this year.

Social media, including Facebook and Twitter are getting increasingly popular in the Arab world, and Arabic tweets have grown remarkably in the recent months.

A report published by the French research company Semiocast earlier this year on July 30, 2012, ranked Riyadh at #10 among the world’s cities with the most tweets.

According to the study, Arabic usage continues to grow on Twitter: it is now the 6th language with 2.8 per cent of all public tweets posted in June 2012. “As another sign of this growth, Riyadh is now the 10th most active city, and the number of registered users in Saudi Arabia grew by +93 per cent in six months, reaching 2.9 million,” the study says.

If Saudi users continued to grow at the same rate in the next six months (and there is reason to believe that they did), it’ll be safe to assume that Saudi Twitter users now easily surpass 5.5 million.

The same study says the top city in terms of posted tweets – and we’re sure you couldn’t guess this – was Indonesia’s Jakarta. This study reveals that users from Jakarta were the most active within all cities ranked by the number of posted tweets. Using Semiocast’s technology, 27 per cent of all public tweets were geo-localised at the city level.

More than 2 per cent of all these tweets were posted from the capital of Indonesia, witnessing the activity of Twitter in the country. Bandung, Indonesia’s second largest metropolitan area, ranks 6th among the top cities.

Unsurprisingly, Tokyo ranks second; London ranks third. The first US city is New York and only ranks 5th. As a sign that Twitter grew out of its homeland, San Francisco, where the company is headquartered, represent less than 0.2 per cent of all tweets geo-localised at the city level.

Another study by Semiocast published at the end of last year revealed the number of messages tweeted in the Arabic language grew by 2,146 per cent over the previous 12 months.

“In October 2011, more than 2 million public messages were posted every day on Twitter in Arabic, from about 30,000 in July 2010, a study of 5.6 billion tweets reveals,” the report said. As this was much before the recent Arabic explosion on Twitter, there is reason to believe that, as of today, more than 5 million Arabic messages are posted on Twitter on a daily basis.

“The volume of Arabic messages has multiplied by 22 (+2,146 per cent) in the last 12 months. Arabic is now the 8th most used language on Twitter, and Arabic messages represent 1.2 per cent of all public tweets (2.2 million per day),” the one-year-old study said.

“With recent events, Twitter has grown exceptionally fast in the Middle East. Although they are not part of the top 10 most used languages, Farsi (+350 per cent in one year, but only 50,000 messages per day) and Turkish (+290 per cent, 0.8 per cent of all tweets) have also grown fast over the period,” the study noted in November 2011.

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