Softbank to Help Twitter Get Even Bigger in Japan
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TOKYO -- Twitter is set to get a big boost in Japan, one of its biggest and fastest-growing markets, after the Japanese cellphone carrier Softbank on Tuesday announced new handsets designed to link to the microblogging site, part of a major effort by Softbank to get a piece of America's tech savvy.
Twitter has taken off in a big way here in the past two years, fanned by media exposure and the use of the service by a flurry of celebrities: Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama tweets frequently, as does the astronaut and national hero Soichi Noguchi, who tweets from the International Space Station.
The number of unique users in Japan surged from 521,000 in April 2009 to 7.52 million in March, a 15-fold increase, according to the technology ratings service Nielsen Online Japan. Figures show Twitter is fast catching up to Japan's biggest social networking site, Mixi, which had about 10.8 million unique users in March. An analysis by Semiocast, based in Paris, in February found 14 percent of the millions of tweets per day worldwide are in Japanese.
Twitter's reach in Japan -- the percentage of Internet users who have used the service -- is about 12.3 percent, higher than the service's reach of 10.2 percent in the United States, according to Nielsen. The service trumps Facebook, another American social networking site that has made a foray into Japan, which only has about 1.4 million users in the country, or less than 1 percent of its global membership.
"Twitter has seen tremendous growth all around the world in the past year, but in particular we've seen outstanding growth in Japan," Evan Williams, chief executive of Twitter, said via a live link from the company's headquarters in San Francisco at a Softbank news conference here. "It's become one of our biggest and most important countries."
"We believe Twitter is poised for even greater growth given the tremendous usage of keitai in Japan, and because Twitter has always been focused on the mobile, cellphone experience," Mr. Williams added, using the Japanese word for cellphone.
First Published May 19, 2010 2:00 am
