Although Wall Street might be worried about a slowdown in Twitter’s domestic growth, the website that has brought “tweets” to millions of people is still spreading like wildfire through Asia and Latin America, according to a new report by eMarketer research firm.Over the past year, Twitter’s growth in both Europe and the United States has started to slow down, and stock prices took a tumble to new lows. Twitter’s shares closed last week at $30.50, less than $4 above their original public offering. Although investors might be worried about the plateau that growth seems to have reached here, the social network can still make huge gains in developing markets. Twitter’s user base is projected to grow an incredible 25% this year worldwide, and is expected to
jump another 19% in 2015 based on recent growth patterns, according to eMarketer.
Currently, Twitter makes the majority of its revenue by selling ads that use the same 140-character setup that the rest of its website relies on. Showing that Twitter remains relevant and integral in consumers’ online habits is important for generating ad revenue. The U.S. currently accounts for about 70% of Twitter’s ad revenue, but with growth slowing domestically, it makes sense that the international community might have more to offer.
The up-and-coming developing nations of India, Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia and Brazil have given Twitter the biggest gains this year. “Twitter has a lot of runway ahead for growth internationally,” explains Debra Aho Williamson, who was the principal analyst for the report.
Although the future might still look positive for Twitter’s outlook, eMarketer did note that some of their findings did not agree with Twitter’s own estimates. eMarketer says that Twitter had 183 million active monthly users last year; Twitter counted 241 million. According to Williamson, eMarketer took more effort to weed out duplicate and business accounts.
“The fact that eMarketer was able to find inconsistencies with some of the data Twitter has put out doesn’t really surprise me,” says Tim McDonald,
Head of Marketing at RankXpress. “Now that Twitter is publicly traded they need to keep investors happy and slightly padding stats is a way to do just that.”