Recently I hear a lot of rumors about Twitter and Facebook slowing down their growth tempo and their audiences getting smaller. Last week GlobalWebIndex revealed some interesting data that actually shows the opposite: apparently Facebook and Twitter are still the fastest growing social networks in the world. What is also interesting, vKontakte and Odnoklassniki are in that list as well:

Back to Twitter. Twitter has been growing in Russia during the last 2 years. The amount of Twitter users in Russia varies depending on a source. According to Semiocast, the microblogging service had 5 million Russian-based users in the beginning of 2012; Yandex shows 7,18 million indexed Russian Twitter accounts today.

GlobalWebIndex says that the amount of active Twitter users in Russia increased by more than 60% during the last half of 2012. Can it be right?

As for Facebook, in the market totally dominated by vKontakte and Odnoklassniki, it apparently managed to grow by 33% from Q2 to Q4 of 2012.

Reliable or not, these numbers still are a good indication of how engaged the Russian Internet audience is in social networking. People spend a lot of time browsing social content, and these stats prove once again that VK, Odnoklassniki and even Facebook should be a vital element of any company online strategy.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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Russians like Twitter, and the growth of Twitter usage in Russia has been astonishing. In February this year Semoicast reported that Russia is 20th country in the world in terms of Twitter account. Half a year later Russia climbed up to position 14:

See full report: http://semiocast.com/publications/2012_07_30_Twitter_reaches_half_a_billion_accounts_140m_in_the_US

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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Microblogging is a hot topic in Russian press. Only recently I wrote that Yandex indexed 1.68 million Russian Twitter accounts and that Mail.ru created their own microblogging service Futubra. Last week Ria.ru reported (in Russian) from Paris, that French Semiocast counted 5 million Twitter accounts that belong to Russians.

According to Semiocast research, Russia is 20th country in the world in terms of registered Twitter accounts. The leader is, of course, US with 107,7 million accounts, followed by Brazil (33,3 million accounts), Japan (29,9 million), UK (23,8 million) and Indonesia (19,5 million).

As Yandex noted before, Russians are not exactly active Twitter users. Semiocast reported that only 27% of Russians logged in and wrote at least one tweet during the period from September 1, 2011 till November 30, 2011. This percentage, as low as it seems, is the same as, for example, in the UK.

Another Western social network, Google+, seems to be doing pretty well in Russia too, according to PlusDemographics.com anyway. The resource reports that the number of Russian Google+ users is close to 1,4 million. The majority of people using Google+ in Russia are male (75%); over 80% of the user base are 18-34 years old.

Not surprisingly, a significant number of Google+ users are employed by tech companies, such as Yandex, Google itself, Intel and Microsoft.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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In July 2011 Yandex reported that Russian-speaking audience of Twitter crossed 1 million mark. Today Yandex’s Twitter user rating includes 1,68 million accounts. This is over 50% growth in the last 6 month!

Vedomosti.ru, one of the major Russian newspapers, writes that a lot of this growth happened during Russian Parliament elections time in December 2011 and that some of Cyrillic terms such as “выборы” (elections), “Путин” (Putin) made it into worldwide trending topics. Many argue though that thousands of Twitter accounts were created during- and after-elections period to tone down the protests, which might have contribute into the growth figure.

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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Yandex endorse microblogging. Yandex loves Twitter. But do you know how big Twitter is in Russia? Social marketers have created a lot of buzz around Twitter this year, and perhaps, rightly so. But entering Russian market and setting up you online marketing strategy, always remember: Russian Internet sphere is a) unique, b) not as developed as the Western Internet sphere, c) likes local products and services. So Twitter works for you in the US? This is how things are in Russia:

Worldwide Twitter has over 50 000 000 users, which produce 4 000 000 tweets every day. In Russia they’ve got only 76 000 Twitter users and approximately 50 000 tweets per day.

So what is the future of Twitter in Russia? Is it coming? Is it gonna become the place to be, search, communicate? Hmm.. Hard to say. It’s grown 10 times in 2009, but it is still very small. According to the Yandex’s rating of popular microblogs, the main action is happening at blogs@mail.ru and micorblogs on QIP.ru

Yandex also made a statement about Twitter: Twitter’s audience consists of geeks. Come to Twitter if you need exactly these people and you have something to tell them.

=)

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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I came back from my vacation just a couple of days ago and WOW, what do I see?! Yandex released some services for microblogging! So Russians go social [media]!

First, Russia was announced to be world’s most engaged social networking audience (according to comScore, July 2), now this.

In my previous post about social media in Russia I mentioned that Twitter was not that popular.. Well, seems like it might have a bright future in my motherland after all (half motherland, anyway..)!

So, that is what Yandex has released:

Advanced Blog Search now supports search in microblogs

To select this option and try yet another search engine (this time Russian), go to http://blogs.yandex.ru/advanced.xml and select Search in Microblogs:

How to do Twitter search on Yandex

Did not work for me today as the service was temporary unavailable, but I believe normally it works just fine  =)

Please note, that this search engines goes not only through Twitter, but also through blogs.mail.ru, mblogi.qip.ru, my.ya.ru, juick.com, ljchat.ru, jamango.ru, friendfeed.com, smster.ru and smsnik.com.

Rating of microblogs
Here they list the most popular Twitter users. The first column is Yandex rating, the second – number of followers. Today I saw there were 38 541 Twitter accounts in the rating. Will check in a week and update you on progress =)

Yandex is now on Twitter!
http://twitter.com/yandex – here. I’ve been following it for a while and can’t say Yandex is extremely active. However they post some good links every now and then.
NB! Tweetdeck seems to have problems with displaying Cyrillic characters =( That’s too bad. I love Tweetdeck.

Yandex can read, understand, search and index shortened URLs

…such as , tinyurl.com, bit.ly, clck.ru or twtr.ru (there are even local Russian URL shortening services). I will write a separate post about it.

Cool stuff! =)

Anna

Anna is a blogger and online marketing professional specializing in SEO and SEM for Russian search engines. To see more of Anna's posts, follow her on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

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