“It might seem that Twitter is an American-centric social network. It is not so. Twitter is a Japanese-centric social network”. During a company meeting on Wednesday, Elon Musk surprised his employees with a sentence leaked from a recording obtained by The Verge. Musk continues: “Japan and the United States have roughly the same number of users on Twitter. But the United States has three times the population of Japan.”
Consideration that gave Musk the opportunity to open up to a geographical evolution of Twitter: to expand his network in Asia, starting from the archipelago, because the best market at the moment is precisely Japan.
Twitter numbers in Japan
Japan is the second country in the world to use Twitter. Second, and narrowly, only to the United States. It has about 50 million users, about 45% of the Japanese population, the second most used social network after Youtube (Bigbeat data). But why is the social network just bought by Elon Musk so successful in Japan?
Some economic data. The first time we realize the importance of Japan for Twitter’s coffers is 2018. In that year, sales of advertising on the social network rose by 34% and drove the good quarterly results of the social network in the following years. Twitter in Japan is doing well, and making revenues. More revenue than the entire Meta galaxy makes there. More than TikTok.
Interviewed by Nikkei, a Twitter manager said that the secret of Twitter’s success among companies is that the Japanese prefer to look there for product reviews. Wary of comments on company sites or ecommerce sites, they look for real people who have actually bought products and then tell their own experience.
The explosion of Twitter in Japan: anonymity and brevity
Twitter exploded in Japan in the hours and days following the 2011 earthquake. The number of accounts grew by 33% in just a few hours. It immediately became a tool for keeping up to date on the situation in real time. Since then, Twitter has been the most used platform for commenting on live events. The world record for tweets shared with the same hashtag was set in 2013, when 143,199 tweets per second were shared during a live broadcast of an animated film by Hayao MiyazakiLauta – Castle in the sky.
Many Japanese Twitter accounts are anonymous. And anonymity would be another success factor for the social network in Japan. The possibility of not being recognized, of being able to hide behind a fancy username, is explained in the blogs that have analyzed the phenomenon, would be rather appreciated by Japanese users. Prone to a subtle form of embarrassment about expressing one’s opinions publicly. Or simply in being recognized.
Another aspect concerns the lingua. There are 126 million Japanese speakers in the world. It is the sixth most popular language on the internet. The Japanese writing system allows 140 characters to express complex concepts in a limited space: as an approximation we can say that each tweet in Japanese contains 3-4 tweets written in the Western alphabet. The most popular accounts in Japan are those of food bloggers, who manage to write entire recipes in a tweet, or so.