There are only 24 Arab nationals whose Twitter accounts have over one million followers, and of these 24 users, 11 are Saudis, a new survey said. Other nationalities include Kuwait, UAE, Jordan and Egypt.

Although Egypt has the largest population, only four of its Twitter users have over one million followers. This indicates the popularity of Facebook over Twitter in the Maghreb countries, where a famous Moroccan female singer has only 135,000 followers. Jordan's Queen Rania Al-Abdullah is an exception because she is hugely popular, with 2.6 million followers. The survey said the most prominent Saudi Twitter accounts belonged to those from political and religious fields. Sports fared poor in this regard. The large number of followers of these Twitter accounts, however, do not come close to that of celebrities in the West, such as, the Canadian singer Justin Bieber, who has over 35 million followers.

Meanwhile only 12 percent of the Saudi population uses Twitter, of which 55 percent are males and 45 percent are females, a work paper found.

The work paper, which was read two days ago before a symposium held by the Eastern Province Chamber of Commerce and Industry, is written by Nidal Hutami, CEO of IT City. The theme of the symposium was “Electronic marketing through social networks.” Ash Sharq reported that Hutami said in his paper that there are 200 million active Twitter users. Everyday users post 175 million tweets, of which 17 million are in Arabic.

About 325 new accounts and 100,000 tweets are added to the social networking site every minute, the report said. Seventy-five percent of world leaders use Twitter, while 88 percent of the users follow at least one brand name. Hutami said that the companies that use Twitter double their customers every month. In 2012, 44 percent of marketers gained customers through Twitter. He said that for Saudi users, Facebook comes in at third place. YouTube ranks first worldwide, with a growth rate of 109 percent among the numbers of videos watched. Saudi users ranked first in the number of videos watched worldwide, which came to 90 million views.