Twitter user base to grow 25% this year

Twitter's user base would grow almost 25 per cent this year, even as concerns increase over its ability to maintain its popularity.

New data from independent research firm Emarketer suggested the social service would continue to see double-digit growth till 2018, as the micro-blogging site gained popularity in emerging markets and reached 400 million users within four years.

The research would come as a boost for the social network, which had been the subject of speculation that it might not be able to keep up its pace of growth.

The news for Twitter was however, not all positive as Emarketer's research also showed that the service might have less active monthly users that the 220 million it claimed.

According to Emarketer's research, the figure was 183 million, since it relied on consumer data to discount multiple accounts, business accounts and other potential double-counting.

The research showed that the number of Twitter users in the Asia-Pacific region had already outgrown those in the US and Western Europe. In 2014, Asia-Pacific was set to account for almost a third of Twitter's users, as against 23.7 per cent in North America.

Emarketer's projections show that by 2018, Asia-Pacific's share would increase to 40 per cent.

Twitter's user-base was projected to increase by 24.4 per cent, as per new figures released by eMarketer, and the double-digit growth would continue for at least the next four years.

According to the company's projections, the number of Twitter users would reach around 400 million worldwide.

Growth was expected to come mostly from new users in Asia-Pacific and the region already made up 32.8 per cent of Twitter's user-base, more than North America (23.7 per cent) and Western Europe (16.8 per cent).

"The US will remain the single largest country in terms of the number of individual Twitter users throughout our forecast, but currently, it still represents just over 20% of all Twitter users worldwide," said eMarketer.

"That market share will drop over the years, leaving room for Twitter to grow its non-US ad revenues by leveraging an expanding user base in emerging markets."

Meanwhile, Twitter monitoring firm Twopcharts found that a significant number of people who had created a Twitter account had never used it. According to the firm 44 per cent of Twitter's 982 million accounts had never seen any action - not even a single Tweet.