Japan Is One of the World’s Strongest Markets for Twitter

Twitter continues to reign supreme in Japan, with almost 64% of the country’s social network users, or 34.0 million people, logging on to the platform this year, according to eMarketer’s latest forecast of worldwide social network users.

We significantly upgraded our estimates for Twitter users in Japan since our previous forecast—establishing the country as one of the world’s leading Twitter audiences.

Twitter usage in Japan took off following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, when it was relied on as a key communications tool after many telephone networks were damaged. Since then, people in Japan have embraced the social network.

“Twitter users in Japan have been famously immune to the prior 140-character-limit restriction given their use of single-character Japanese words,” eMarketer senior forecasting director Monica Peart said. “Social network users here flocked to Twitter in 2011 and since then have remained loyal, logging some of the world’s most robust tweets long before the expanded 280-character allowance took effect last year.”

Meanwhile, Facebook and Instagram have been battling for second place. We expect Instagram will surpass Facebook by the end of 2019, with nearly 42% of social network users in Japan using the platform at least once a month.