Jakarta has beaten Tokyo, London, Sao Paulo and New York to come first in the world in terms of Twitter activity, according to a new study.

Bandung, Jakarta’s neighbouring city and Indonesia’s second largest metropolitan area, ranked sixth.

Semiocast, a Paris-based research company, also revealed that in six months the number of users across the board on the social media site had increased by 50 per cent.

With the popularity of social networking sites peaking during the Arab uprisings of 2011, Twitter is still growing fast in the region.

Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh ranked number ten on the list, with the number of registered users in the kingdom growing by more than 93 per cent in six months, to reach 2.9 million users.

Arabic is now the sixth most popular language on Twitter, used in 2.8 per cent of all public tweets.

Changing trends

The US remains the leader in terms of overall share of Twitter users, with 27.4 per cent (141.8 million accounts). Users in the US posted 25.8 per cent of all public tweets in June 2012, according to the study.

While the US is the leader in terms of share of accounts, growth is higher elsewhere.

The registration rate in Brazil continues to be high, with its number of Twitter accounts increasing from 33.3 million to 41.2 million between January and July this year. Brazilians now represent eight per cent of all Twitter accounts.

Japan lost its second place in the user rankings to Brazil, but continues to have one of the highest rates of usage.

In June 2012, 10.6 per cent of all public tweets were posted from Japan, while Japanese users represent 6.7 per cent of all Twitter users. As a result, Japanese remains the second most used language on Twitter, after English.

Tokyo ranked second on the list of most active cities by tweets, followed by London, Sao Paolo and New York to round out the top five.

The top ten countries in terms of Twitter usage are: the US, Brazil, Japan, the UK, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Canada, Spain and the Philippines.