Twitter is widely used in Pakistan, including by prominent public figures such as celebrities, cricketers, cabinet ministers and members of parliament.
Kenyans are increasingly turning to Twitter to catch up with the latest political and celebrity news, making it a potential platform for campaigns in the run up to the next general election.
Data released on Thursday showed that Kenyans made two and a half million tweets in the last three months of 2011, ranking them second in Africa behind South Africans who had five million tweets.
The research by Portland Communication and Tweetminster showed that the most popular use of twitter was conversation with friends and monitoring news, entertainment and politics.
A small percentage also used it to look for jobs.
Top 20 list
Corporates such as Safaricom Ltd, KCB Group, Barclays Kenya and DStv also use the social media as a platform to interact with their clients.
The top five countries also included Nigeria and Egypt with 1.6 million and 1.2 million tweets respectively.
Of the members of the East Africa Community Rwanda featured with only 92,000 tweets. Uganda and Tanzania did not make it to the top 20 list.
Mark Flanagan, a partner at Portland Communication said countries covered in the survey carried 70 per cent of Africa’s total population and account for 85 per cent of the continents gross domestic product.
With 88 per cent of the continents Internet users, the tweets are largely from those aged 21-29 years while the average age of Twitter users worldwide stands at 39.
The social network is however trailing behind Facebook in terms of traction. Other social media that are popular include flickr, MySpace and Google plus. 57 per cent of the tweets were sent from mobile phones with the RIMBlackBerry brand topping the list, followed by iPhone and Android operated smartphones.
Other operating systems also made up a small percentage of the mobile tweets.
The Twitter revolution has seen high- profile tweeters like Raila Odinga, Uhuru Kenyatta, Martha Karua Bob Collymore and the media not being left behind with Jeff Koinange and Larry Madowo tweeting.
Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Evan Williams and Biz Stone in 2006, and boasted over 300 million users as at June 2011.
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Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
