Last year, Twitter reported that their users went from primarily being based in the US to being mostly international – and this trend is on the increase.

Twitter is the most popular social media platform for businesses, and it will become increasingly important for ecommerce companies that rely upon their rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), now that Matt Cutts from Google has confirmed that the search giant is factoring signals from social networks into its algorithm.

And yet, there’s lots of evidence out there that British businesses in particular are not yet taking advantage of Twitter, especially for their foreign language target markets.  The Auros ‘Are you serious about social?’ study shows only a quarter of British retailers with Twitter accounts use them to respond to customer enquiries, and website globalisation consultant John Yunker’s report Twittering in Tongues found that there was only one British firm – PricewaterhouseCoopers – in the top ten global corporate tweeters.

Econsultancy’s 2010 Social Media and Online PR report also found that while 83% of marketers said they’ll increase their social media spend in 2011, only 26% planned to run campaigns in more than one country and language.

The moral of the story is that in the near future it will be essential for companies with foreign language websites to have foreign language Twitter feeds to support these websites by building links and brand buzz. Here are a few stats to get you thinking about tweeting around the world.

Tweeting by Country

Americans are still by far the biggest tweeters, occupying 33.3% of site traffic, followed by India at 8.2% and Japan at 7.1%. However, if you look at the top 10 global markets by reach, the United States doesn’t even feature. According to data produced by comScore Media Metrix in December 2010, the Netherlands has the highest market reach with 22.3% of their population using Twitter, closely followed by Brazil’s 21.8%. The top five per capita tweeters are rounded off by Venezuela, Japan and Indonesia (with the UK coming in at number 10 with 13% market reach).

Top Multilingual Corporate Tweeters

John Yunker’s report ‘Twittering in Tongues’ has been mentioned in the media lately in reference to the lack of top British businesses with Twitter accounts in more than one language. Notably only one British company, PricewaterhouseCoopers, made the top 10 of global tweeters. Despite the potential marketing and search benefits of localised Twitter campaigns, many British firms are lagging behind with their social media efforts.

The report researched the Twitter use of 225 companies, representing 80% of the Interbrand 100. The results indicate that only a third supported Twitter feeds outside of their domestic markets, yet all of them had at least two localised websites.

Sony came out on top of the list with its 20 international Twitter feeds, owing much thanks to Sony’s Music division. Microsoft, Cisco Systems and the aforementioned PwC also scored highly, with 10 or more different Twitter feeds.

These companies have realised the benefits of backing up their international websites with language-specific Twitter feeds, allowing them to build their social clout and communicate directly with customers in their prime markets.

The fact is that, in the not too distant future, it’s likely that international social media strategies like these will be as important as having optimised websites, and those who haven’t gotten the jump on multilingual social media will have to scramble to catch up.