According to a study from research firm Semiocast while the US is still easily first place on Twitter in terms of accounts, with around 107.7 million in total, Brazil is now the second biggest nation on the microblogging service.

There are now 33.3 million Brazilians with Twitter accounts, which is enough to push it passed Japan on 29.9 million.

That said while Brazilians have swarmed to Twitter they do not make as much noise as the Japanese who tweet much more. As reported recently Japan is the only country in the world where Twitter has a higher number of monthly unique visitors than Facebook.

The Semiocast report analysed 383 million Twitter user profiles created before January 1st 2012 and used its proprietary platform and tools to process user profiles in order to determine the location of each user using all available information (free-form location declared in user profile, time zone, language used to post tweets and GPS coordinates for the very few concerned tweets).

It says there were 107.7 million accounts created before January 1st, 2012, the US now represent 28.1% of all Twitter users with around 5.6 million new accounts created there in December alone.

So while Brazil is now second behind the US, 30% of Japanese accounts have posted a message between September 1st 2011 and November 30th 2011, compared to 25% for Brazilians.

The report says that the global average for the period is 27% and Japanese remains the second most used language on Twitter after English.

Back in the UK

The rise of Brazil shunts the UK into 4th place globally with 23.8 million Twitter user profiles currently online.

That puts us some way ahead of Indonesia which ranks 5th with 19.5 million.

After that numbers of accounts start to fall away very quickly. France for instance has 5.2 million Twitter user profiles putting it 16th country with Germany 18th. Italy doesn’t feature in the top 20.

That seems to suggest pretty strongly that social media use in Europe is at a much lower point with many million fewer consuming news for instance on Twitter.

Users from the Netherlands most active

Interesting the study also reveals that users from the Netherlands are the most active within top countries with 33% of accounts located there posting at least one public message between September 1st, 2011 and November 30th, 2011.

That says Semicoast makes the Netherlands the top country with the highest rate of Twitter users posting tweets, before Japan. The global average is only 27%, as many Twitter users mostly use the service to read tweets from others.

“If one also considers accounts that have been updated in some other way (e.g. the user did not post but changed its account avatar or followed another user), the Netherlands also rank first, with at least 52% of users who connected to Twitter during the period. The global average for the same metric is 48%,”Semiocast said.