First state of the Twitosphere in Brazil

I published already several blogposts on this blog with an analysis of the Twitosphere is several European countries (see the sidebar). The next country analyzed is not in Europe this time, but in South America : Brazil.

Using the same approach as for the previous countries, I managed to find 421 active Twitter accounts from Brazil. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Brazil if the location explicitely refers to Brazil or if the Twitter user was located in Brazil according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Brazilian Twitter users is probably higher as only 50% of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post).

For a population of 190 million people (according to Wikipedia), Brazil has 421 Twitter accounts, which means that there is a Brazilian Twitter account for every 451,000 inhabitants. Currently for Iceland and the Netherlands there is one Twitter account for roughly 10,000 inhabitants.

History of the Brazilian Twitter accounts
This graph below shows the history of the Brazilian Twitter accounts. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Brazilian Twitter accounts.


Oldest Twitter accounts from Brazil
http://twitter.com/crisdias - CrisDias - first message on 13/07/2006
http://twitter.com/vitorl - Vitor Leite - first message on 20/07/2006
http://twitter.com/guercheLE - Luciano E. Guerche - first message on 21/07/2006
http://twitter.com/eduardonasi - Eduardo Nasi - first message on 26/07/2006
http://twitter.com/flaviadurante - Flavia Durante - first message on 26/07/2006

Public of Private
Only 36 Twitter acounts from Brazil or 8.6% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends. In the analyzed European countries this percentage varied from 3.5% (Italy) to 22% (Belgium).

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 10% of the Brazilian Twitter accounts do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Brazil follows 12,0 Twitter accounts. In the analyzed European countries this average varied from 9,6 (Belgium) to 32 (Italy).


Top 5
http://twitter.com/kleverson - Kleverson Neves - 206 following
http://twitter.com/ChrisD - Chris D - 146 following
http://twitter.com/Luzdeluma - Luma - 146 following
http://twitter.com/antoun - Henrique Antoun - 126 following
http://twitter.com/tdoria - Tiago Doria - 116 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 6% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. An average Twitter account from Brazil has 12.0 followers. This average is in line with the averages observed for the European countries : between 10.5 (Belgium) to 26 (Italy).


Top 5
http://twitter.com/ChrisD - Chris D - 146 followers
http://twitter.com/tdoria - Tiago Doria - 116 followers
http://twitter.com/amanda_mpbr - Amanda Maykot - 73 followers
http://twitter.com/bdieu - Bee Kerouac - 73 followers
http://twitter.com/fseixas - Fabio Seixas - 52 followers

Updates
Only 3% of the accounts from Brazil are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Brazil has 57 updates, which is lower than the averages observed for the European countries from 72 (Belgium) to 106 (Italy and Spain). The lower average for Brazil can be explained by the fact that there is only one Twitter account with automatically generated Twitter messages. This kind of Twitter messages are often generated by news services. Please keep in mind that these averages are only snapshots, as lots of new Twitter messages (or Tweets) are published every day.


Top 5
http://twitter.com/jornaldedebates - Jornal de Debates - 1955 updates
http://twitter.com/antoun - Henrique Antoun - 691 updates
http://twitter.com/fernandolins - Fernando Lins - 658 updates
http://twitter.com/jplages - Joao Paulo - 516 updates
http://twitter.com/julielondongirl - ~*Julie*~ - 492 updates

Degree of activity
35% of all Twitter accounts from Brazil with a public feed did not post an update in the last 20 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

52% of all Twitter accounts from Brazil with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive. This percentage (52%) is significantly higher than the percentages of active users observed for the European countries.

Conclusion
This state of the Brazilian Twitosphere is only a snapshot, meaning that the figures mentioned in this post have already changed because the Twitosphere is a very dynamic environment with several new accounts being created every day, new connections being made between accounts (following/followers) and of course new messages being written every hour of the day.

Users from Brazil were among the first to start using Twitter (from July 2006). There was a sharp increase in the number of Twitter users in Brazil from mid April 2007, about at the same time as for the analyzed European countries. The main difference is that the growth continues for Brazil, whereas the growth slowed down for the European countries. The creation of new Twitter accounts in Brazil seems even to accelerate from the beginning of August 2007.

The current Twitter community in Brazil is increasing day by day, the percentage of active Twitter accounts is higher than in the analyzed European countries. The future for Twitter in Brazil looks bright.