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Twitter reaches 10 million active accounts in the UK

Twitter UK is celebrating its first year of operation over here and has announced that it has 10 million active users in the UK who log on each month
Written by Eileen Brown, Contributor

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Credit: Twitter

Today Twitter UK announced that it has over 10 million active users in the UK. It defines active users as those that log in at least once every 30 days. Twitter reckons that looking at the number of active users is a more useful statistic than tracking registered accounts.

Twitter has been quietly opening up offices across the world as its user base grows. Last year it opened up an office in the UK and it is celebrating its first year of operation over here.

Twitter continues to grow in popularity. According to Twopcharts over 581 million accounts have been registered on Twitter, although many are inactive and about 10 per cent have been deleted or suspended. Up to half of these accounts have never sent a tweet.

Twitter claims to have 140 million users globally; however these are not real people with real accounts. Marketing teams have been quick to capitalise on the opportunity to broadcast their message to the widest possible forum. Brands have accounts, as do cats, dogs and horses.

Spam bots proliferate, tweeting get rich quick messages from multiple accounts simultaneously.

Of course some users might have more than one account, one for business and one for personal tweets. Clients like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite let you tweet simultaneously from several accounts at the same time.

But to state that Twitter has 10 million active accounts -- almost one in seven of the population of the UK -- has an active Twitter account. That is certainly an impressive claim.

Since the service launched in 2006 brands have been taking advantage of the opportunity to connect with their customers. The new Twitter profile pages encourage even small businesses to create a presence. New ways of advertising like the ASCII art animated Twitter commercial from Smart bring new ways to connect.

Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts, launched in February opened up Twitter's ad platform to small businesses. Each time you search on Twitter you will see Promoted Tweets and Accounts at the top of your stream from a variety of businesses and personalities.

80 per cent of users in the UK also access Twitter from their mobile devices compared to Twitter's global average of 55 per cent. This higher percentage for UK users seems puzzling until you look at the differences in mobile data packages in the UK compared to the US.

Orange/T-Mobile, the largest mobile operator in the UK offers pay-monthly contract packages. For a data plan including 100 minutes voice, unlimited texts and 500mb data the monthly contract cost is £20 ($32).

In the US for a comparable amount of data and unlimited text and voice on a monthly plan, you could pay about $100 per month.

Perhaps the increase is due to something as simple as cost and not because of our tech-savvy excessive use of our mobile devices.

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