As you know, I disagree with the Twitter user statistic from Comscore and believe that 376,000 Twitter users in the Middle East region is way too high as an estimate.

By our reckoning the UAE currently leads the region in terms of both user growth and overall numbers, and these figures suggest that the UAE should have tens of thousands of Twitter users, which is simply not true (Twitter was only ‘unblocked’ by the UAE last August). However, I think that this is perhaps confusing terminology versus simply an erroneous statistic. Comscore tracks, measures and analyses a wide range of Internet sites and most of their data is based on site visits. Twitter is a community for registered users and you can’t participate unless you sign-up, so if Comscore did base its stats on measuring unique site visits for Twitter, then this could explain a lot.

Spot On estimates that the number of Twitter users in the Arab world (not the same as Comscore’s Middle East category) during March with location data in their user-profiles was about 3,000 (new figures coming soon) including hundreds of inactive user accounts. We’d add to that another 10-15% taking into consideration users that don’t have Arab world location data entered into their profiles, but are nonetheless living in the Arab world. So, no more than 3,500 registered users all-told, 4,000 if you want to be really generous.

So, why the huge difference? I think that the Comscore statistic probably comes from unique visitors to Twitter.com pages to include referrals from other websites and search engines. Twitter posts and profiles turn up frequently in Google searches these days and this likely accounts for an increase in clicks. However, to participate in the Twitter community, you need to be registered as a Twitter user and so a figure for unique browser visits isn’t really useful as an assessment of registered Twitter users. Although you can’t argue with the fact that Twitter is getting attention!

Sincerely,

Carrington Malin
Spot On Public Relations