At Chirp, Twitter revealed its total registered users – 105,779,710. With this ‘official’ figure, let’s take another stab at estimating total Twitter users in Asia. This is a revised estimates to the previous posting, Twitter in Asia, by Country. The estimates now is based on the ‘official’ total registered Twitter users and Twitter population’s percentage breakdown, by country (source: Sysomos).

During Chirp, co-founder @Biz also revealed that 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com. So, Fred Wilson’s argument that “Twitter ecosystem is about 3x Twitter.com” seems to apply. However, comScore’s estimate of 60 million unique visitors at Twitter.com may be way off! The use of the 60-million figure in my previous estimates resulted in inflated estimates of Twitter population in Asia.

With the use new official total registered users, the new estimates of total Twitter users in each country are reduced by roughly half (compared to my previous estimates). Maybe now, the estimates are closer to reality.

Asian Countries, by % of Twitter Users and Total Users

105,779,710 users and new estimates of Twitter users in Asia originally appeared on GreyReview on April 20, 2010.

Today is the finale event of the Everyone Connects campaign by Telekom Malaysia (TM). The campaign revolved around a song titled Through My Window, performed by a local indie band, Bunkface. The song was released on October 19 2009 as a mystery song over the airwaves. During the past 1 month, it generated thousands of mentions on the social media space and also generated over 6000 user-generated versions of the song (audio and video). This campaign is both ambitious in scale and expansive in scope, designed to deliver a fresh narration to the TM brand. When it started, I predicted Everyone Connects as a social media campaign but it also involved the use of traditional media like TV, radio and newspapers. It delicately weave the online and offline activities to create a seamless brand experience. It involves several notable ‘firsts,’ in terms of tools and methods used. Anyway, here are the key moments of the Everyone Connects campaign:

October 19 2009: Mystery Song on Radio
The song ‘Through My Window’ being played over the airwaves (HITZfm, HOTfm, Xfm) – hear Rudy of HITZfm announced it. No mention of the singer. The website ‘www.EveryoneConnects.net’ with the song (for download) and lyric. Also, with this phrase “Everyone Connects is about getting people to communicate & collaborate because when everyone’s connected, anything is possible.” Twitter, Facebook and Friendster profile pages also went live.

October 20 2009: The Star newspaper
Appeared on the front-page of The Star, “Unknown song rocks the nation.”

October 21 2009: Pixelated Images
Blurred images of the band who sang ‘Through My Window’ appeared on Everyone Connects’ website.

October 23 2009: The Revelation
It’s TM campaign. TV commercial started to appear in the evening on major TV networks.

Full version of www.EveryoneConnects.com launched.

Banner concert appeared on the website too; the first time it is being used in Malaysia. Also, there’s an online mixer for people to create and mashup the song ‘Through My Window.”

October 25 2009: Super Dance Online Extreme Connecting Dancers Tournament 2009 Kick-off
The tournament is designed to reach out and engage the online games community, specifically the 150,000-strong Super Dance Online Extreme players around Malaysia. This is the first time a campaign song is inserted into the game’s playlist.

October 25 2009: Sing Along Booths
Sing Along Booths appeared at shopping malls, universities/colleges, office buildings and cinemas. Videos of people singing were recorded and posted on www.EveryoneConnects.net.

November 21 2009: The Grand Finale
Today is the grand finale event for the month-long Everyone Connects campaign; currently happening at Jalan Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur. Some before-event photos:

The Anatomy of #EveryoneConnects originally appeared on GreyReview on November 21, 2009.

There are now more than 1 million users of Facebook in Malaysia. Friendster said there are 2.2 million active Malaysian users on its social network. Now, what about Twitter? In December 2008, TwitterFacts estimated a total of 3,429 Twitter users in Malaysia. I believe the number has increased since then.

Let’s look elsewhere for hints, clues and indications. WeFollow, a user-generated Twitter Directory by Kevin Rose, where users self-tagged to a set of 3 keywords to describe themselves. There are only 274 users who tagged themselves to ‘malaysia’ but I’m quite sure the figure doesn’t reflect the current total Malaysians on Twitter.

TwitterCounter and Twitter Grader directories also offer listing of Twitter users by country. Unfortunately, Grader only list Top 50 users whereas TwitterCounter limits its listing to 10,020 profiles, per location. TwitterCounter says it is tracking 3.9 million unique Twitter users and yes, a search of ‘malaysia’ returns 10,020 Twitter usernames.

There are two ‘live’ directories, which are indexing Twitter users – TwitDir and Twellow. At the time of this posting, TwitDir has a total of 4,013,391 accounts and 2,231 of them with ‘Malaysia’ within their location detail. Twellow called itself Twitter Yellow Pages and it categorizes Twitter users into various categories, based on bio details. Currently, there are a total of 6.6 million Twitter profiles in its database. At the time of this posting, a search of ‘malaysia’ yields a total of 7,766 accounts.

Take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes

Based on TwitDir directory, the percentage of Twitter users from Malaysia is 0.055589%. On Twellow, the percentage is roughly 0.117667%. The average of these two percentages is 0.086628%, which, for the sake of this attempt to estimate the number of Twitter users in Malaysia, constitutes the percentage of Malaysian users in Twitterville. For some unfathomable reason, that percentage of remains constant from now until 2013 (beyond that, it’s anyone’s bet).

For total Twitter users worldwide from 2009 to 2013, let’s use Twitter’s private-now-public estimates. Twitter defines a user as “unique individual having a conscious twitter experience in a given week.” The following table shows the estimated number of Malaysia Twitter users for the next four years, assuming the percentage of Malaysian within Twitterville remains constant at 0.086628%.

By end of this year, there are more than 20,000 Twitter users in Malaysia. By 2011, the number of users will swell to more than 300,000 and the half-a-million mark will be crossed in 2012. By end of 2013, there will be an estimated total of 866,280 Twitter users in Malaysia.

So, even when Twitter achieved its dream of becoming the first web service with a billion users in 2013, crystal ball says total Malaysia Twitter users will not cross the 1 million user mark (a feat Facebook already achieved in March 2009).

And there you have it. Prognostication or hallucination? Find me on Twitter @zhiQ and do let me know if I should ditch my crystal ball.

My Crystal Ball Says 866,280 Twitter Users in Malaysia by 2013 originally appeared on GreyReview on July 31, 2009.