In its home country, the iconic little blue bird seems lost. With only 22% American adults using the platform and a ranking far lower than that of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, Twitter’s hopes in the US are dire. However, in one region of its international travels, the real-time microblogging platform is soaring. In the words of Yu Sasamoto, the local country manager, Twitter “started as a lifeline and morphed into the culture.”
This country, where one out of three citizens is an active Twitter user, is Japan.
Today in Japan, there are a total of 45 million active users, making the nation Twitter’s second largest market globally and second in total penetration. According to the Japan-based digital marketing agency Humble Bunny, Japan is the only country where Twitter is used more frequently than Facebook and Instagram, which have 28 million and 29 million monthly active users respectively.
Demographics-wise, Twitter is also the most wide reaching Western social network in Japan, given a fairly equal male-female split and the fact that some 61.3% of all users are over the age 30. Accessibility seems key to Twitter’s popularity amongst older users. Compared to other networks like Japan-based Line and Facebook, Twitter can be accessed even through feature phones typically used by the Japanese elderly.
Furthermore, amongst youngsters, Twitter is used weekly by nearly three-quarters of Japanese students and half of young professionals, according to Humble Bunny. This makes Twitter an attractive option for video advertising, as smartphones tend to be in the hands of young people who “overwhelmingly” use them for social activities like watching videos. The popularity of video on Twitter was particularly evident during the Winter Olympics last year when national broadcaster NHK’s video of Japanese figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu’s gold-medal-winning short program was streamed over 4 million times and shared 125,000 times. Watching Studio Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky also refreshed the tweets per record record to a whopping 143,199 tweets in August 2013. According to Twitter’s official blog, this spike was 25 times greater than the recent steadier trends of Twitter activity, and more than four times the previous record.
Such popularity, capitalized by In-Stream Video Ads, allowed Twitter to make nearly twice the $1.24 in revenue per non-US user overall from Japanese users in Japan in 2017 and has contributed to Japan becoming Twitter’s second-largest market with $136 million in revenue from Japan in the first quarter of 2019.
Unlike in the U.S., where Twitter is perceived to be more suited for public figures, journalists, and entertainers, Twitter has mass appeal in Japan.
As “Japanese people tend to not feel comfortable expressing feelings or opinions in public,” according to Kiyo Yamauchi, a lead researcher for Twitter in Japan, the ease for Japanese users to sign up without using their real names is a key factor distinguishing Twitter from other popular social media platforms such as LINE and Facebook. With a disproportionate number of anonymous accounts and users with multiple accounts, almost half of active users claim to use Twitter to gather information regarding their interests and hobbies. As such, users tend to have user names corresponding with specific interests, such as the children's character Gachapin and the anime character Naruto. “It’s not surprising,'' says Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s head of product, “for a Japanese user to have, for example, one account for sports, one account for following K-Pop, and another for professional reasons”. Beykpour sees having different profiles as a means for allowing people to express different aspects of their personality - a feature also loved by advertisers who can now define their target markets more closely. .
Being in tune with the preferences of Japanese consumers has long been important in Twitter’s product strategy, according to Beykpour. The bookmarking feature, he says, was created after realizing that many Japanese users were clicking the “like” button in order to save tweets to read later without having them publicly displayed on their profiles.
The reserved nature of Japanese users is seen also in the trains and buses, where according to a 2015 survey by the NHK Culture Research Institute, the average Japanese working person spends over an hour and twenty minutes in. And since talking on one’s phone in public is frowned upon in Japan, most of the eighty minutes can be spent on one’s phone scrolling through tweets and updating followers.
Evidently, Twitter has long recognized its unique position in Japan. The Japanese version was launched in 2008 as the first language officially endorsed after English and the Japan office was the first to open outside the U.S. in 2011. Given how well it seems to fit into the local culture and environment, considering also the site’s usefulness during frequent natural disasters and existing high-quality mobile networks in the country, Twitter is in Japan to stay even as it fades elsewhere.
In other Asian countries with cultural similarities, however, Twitter’s future seems less hopeful. In China, Twitter is banned by the government (although recent figures claim a user base of 3.2 million), while in South Korea, Twitter faces “intense competition” from a more well-established messaging services provided by Kakao, according to its S-1.
Thus, while the unique cultural, social, and political landscape in Japan may have put Twitter in a distinct position there that is propelling Twitter’s much-needed growth, globally, the little blue bird seems yet to find a strong updraft to save it from losing footing.
Sarah Zhang is a College sophomore pursuing studies in International Relations, East Asian Studies, and Consumer Psychology. She is a passionate figure skater in the Penn Figure Skating Club and an ardent reader of poetry translations in DoubleSpeak.
Sources:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-16/how-twitter-became-ubiquitous-in-japan
https://mashable.com/2013/10/22/japan-loves-twitter/
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-how.html
https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-statistics/
https://www.wasabi-communications.com/en/blog/an-overview-of-social-media-in-japan/
https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commute-time-japan/
http://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/yoron/pdf/20160217_2.pdf