Central Asians Rarely Use Twitter, Preferring Other Social Media Platforms

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 12 – Twitter, the best online platform for sharing ideas, promoting them more broadly and organizing actions, has attracted few Central Asians, who when they do go online prefer more personal channels like Facebook and VKontakte. That pattern not only keeps Twitter users few in number but limits the power of that platform to mobilize them politically.

            Those are the key conclusions of a new survey of Twitter use in the countries of post-Soviet Central Asia prepared by the Central Asian Analytic Network, but the research offers a variety of other findings as well (caa-network.org/archives/16348). Among the most important of these are the following:

·         In Kazakhstan, interactions among visitors to the top sites of Facebook and Youtube are 50 and 120 times more frequent than among the top Twitter sites by 50 and 120 times respectively. 

·         Only one in three Twitter posts in Kazakhstan generates a response, and a majority of these are limited to likes. Fewer than one in ten times does some reading a tweet retweet it. 

·         Many of those who maintain Twitter accounts in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are living beyond the borders of those countries.

·         “Practically no one uses Twitter in Tajikistan besides a few political activists and refugees in Europe whose posts attract only a few likes. But even such sporadic activity … has become the cause of frequent blocking of Twitter, along with other social networks” there.

·         Turkmenistan ranks as one of the two worst countries in the world in terms of the penetration of social media. Only North Korea is worse. And as for the increase in the number of visitors in recent years, Turkmenistan ranks third from the bottom of all countries in the world.

“It is difficult too find an exact figure on the number of Twitter users in Central Asia in open sources but one thing is clear: Twitter is vastly less popular than VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Instagram and Facebook,” the survey says.  And that makes the number very small because only 16 percent of Central Asians no use any social media platform at all.

The study suggests that Twitter remains relatively unpopular in Central Asia because much of its traffic is in English, because it does not feature the family, sports and film reports many want and that the other platforms provide, and because it is heavily political, a subject many Central Asians are less interested in. 

The limited penetration of Twitter in Central Asia is “sad,” the analytic center concludes, “because Twitter is a wonderful resource for the exchange of knowledge” and for helping those interested in particular issues and even actions.