Via The Financial Times, an interesting look at emerging markets’ uptake of Twitter:

“…With Facebook’s impending IPO promising to inflate the wealth of 10 of its shareholders by more than $1bn, investors in Twitter will be excited by new research that shows Brazil, the world’s fifth most populated country, has become the microblogging site’s second biggest user. And the even better news: there’s still plenty of scope for growth.

The data come from Semiocast, a social networking consultancy, and shows that Brazil, with 33.3m accounts, has leapfrogged Japan, which has 29.9m. The US remains comfortably in the lead, with 107.1m accounts – 28.1 per cent of all Twitter users.

Source: Semiocast

What’s more, emerging markets now comprise five of the top-10 Twitter-using countries, and 12 of the top-20. But – as you’d expect, given their lower internet usage – when the figures are adjusted by population, they still lag behind established markets.

Beyondbrics has mocked up a chart using the figures by Semiocast and the latest population estimates for the top five countries:

Indonesia, which has 19.5m Twitter accounts, is the world’s fourth most populated country. So as a rough calculation, if Twitter was able to achieve the market penetration it has in the US in Brazil and Indonesia – two markets in which it has already made substantial inroads – it would expand its number of accounts by around 95m. Obviously limitations in internet availability make that a tough proposition in the short run, but it illustrates the spectacular potential for growth that emerging markets offer.

And, of course, not just to Twitter. According to Gregory Lyons, research and insight manager at digital marketing agency iCrossing, Facebook is on course to hit 1bn active users around August 2012 – with the majority coming from emerging markets.

“Developing countries such as India and Brazil have shown strong growth, with India growing from 22m users to 36m and Brazil going from 13m to 30m in the last 9 months,” he said in January.

It looks like we’ll see more social network billionaires yet.”