Middle East Twitter growth rockets

The fast acceleration of Twitter growth is a critical trend for regional marketers considering the impact of social media.

â€oeThere has been a good deal of hype surrounding Twitter, but now we can see from current usage and growth patterns that Twitter is starting to make its presence felt across the region,â€�

said Carrington Malin, managing director of Spot On Public Relations.

â€oeThe exciting news for marketers is that MENA’s Twitter community is set to move from thousands to tens of thousands, opening up new marketing opportunities and, indeed, challenges.â€�

According to Spot On, there are 12,266 Twitter users registered in the Arab world, whilst the website itself attracts many times more unique visits from non-users.

The GCC currently has 8,212 registered Twitter users with the UAE accounting for about 60% of all GCC users. In common with Facebook usage across the region, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have the three largest Twitter communities, accounting for 1,741 users, 1,405 users and 4,952 users respectively. At the end of 2008, the GCC had less than one thousand Twitter users in total.

â€oeWe’re also seeing changes in demographics, as Twitter becomes more broad-based in appeal, spurred on an increasing number of global news stories quoting Twitter or Twitter sources,â€� said Malin.

â€oeWhereas the MENA Twitter community was largely the domain of Internet professionals last year, 2009 has seen great numbers of people from other professions join Twitter, and from communications, media and marketing professions in particular. That has led to Twitter ‘hitting above its weight’ both in terms of media influence and search engine impact.â€�

Spot On’s statistics are based on the agency’s survey, tracking and analysis of registered Twitter accounts across the Middle East and Africa region. The tracked Twitter growth data is one of a number of monitoring and analysis activities carried out by the agency in the social media arena, which include maintaining aggregated social media and media RSS feeds, tagging key media stories as well as providing in-depth social media tracking, analysis and development advisory services to its clients.