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Almost one in three Twitter users are American which means the US tops the chart for the number inhabitants on Twitter, new research has revealed.

Brazil comes second in the rankings while Indonesians and UK residents each accounted for six per cent of tweets apiece.

A sample of 20 per cent of 'georeferenced' tweets between 5 and 13 March was gathered and presented in a tree map by a team led by Mark Graham, research fellow at Oxford Internet Institute and Monica Stephens, PhD student at Humboldt State in California.

Chinese tweeters were almost completely absent as a result of the government's strict censorship laws that stop civilians from accessing the service.

Mexico, Malaysia, Spain, Russia and France were the second grouping of countries with the highest level of Twitter users -  but together these accounted  for fewer than two per cent of the total tweets.

Graham said: 'It is important to point out that georeferenced tweets comprise fewer than one per cent of all tweets and it is possible that significant geographic biases exist in where and how people georeference their content.'

Writing on the Oxford University website site, Graham commented Twitter is a 'particularly useful platform to reveal social, economic, and political processes and practices' due to the fact that it is a relatively open network, with broad participation because of easy access, and allows researchers access to almost any information published through the site.

'Yet, despite the many studies (both inside and outside of academia) that draw on data from Twitter, there is little scholarship devoted to the geography of Twitter,' he added, recommending the need for further study.

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