Twitter Passes 500 Million Users, Study Reveals; Canada Accounts for 2% of All Users

Twitter isn’t as open as sharing its user count as Facebook and LinkedIn seem to be (even before they were public).

It’s not clear why—Twitter’s numbers are plenty impressive—but regardless, it certainly hasn’t kept outsiders from peering in to see what they can find.

According to Paris-based analyst group Semiocast, Twitter cracked the half-billion user mark in June, and was at roughly 517 million accounts as of July.

The US remains the biggest userbase, accounting for 27% of all accounts. Canada ranks eighth with just over 10 million accounts, or about 2% of the total.

It’s important to note that these are accounts, or “Twitter user profiles,” and may not necessarily meet the standard of “active user.” For example, Facebook considers an “active user” to be any account that has logged in in the past 30 days.

With that criteron, Facebook has 955 million users. The company doesn’t disclose how many accounts have been created all-time, but that number would no doubt be well above a billion. However, it’s also a virtually useless statistic.

Twitter’s “active user” count is almost certainly much lower than half a billion, but just how much lower remains difficult to gauge; the social network hasn’t updated its official numbers for quite some time. Either way, it’s evident that the site is growing rapidly, including in Canada.