Deducing global presence from social network

Is it possible to figure out if a company has global presence? In this post, I will try to provide some metrics that can help finding that out. One of the details that twitter users can provide about themselves is their language. So, analyzing the followers by language can provide some insight into the presence of that company in various parts of the globe.

Let’s look at these followers distribution by languages.

In the above data for salesforce we see that majority of the followers are English speaking. Next highest is Spanish speaking at only 2.23% and then French (1.48%) and Portuguese (1.04%) just above 1%.

In case of Workday, only Spanish is more than 1% in addition to English which is at 96.07% (slightly more than salesforce).

Once again Spanish speaking users come second for Oracle Cloud. What’s also interesting is that Oracle Cloud has a little more global distribution, albeit relatively now. And the reason for this is probably because there are already a lot of followers of the main company.

Statistics don’t always reveal the truth. By looking the data above we can’t immediately conclude that these companies have presence predominantly in USA and may be UK. A lot of internet users and those following technology companies are likely to be fluent in English and hence no matter where they are, they may have their profile setup with English.

But not all hope is lost. In the next post, we will see the same followers list distributed by Location and see how that differs from the distribution by language and how each one indicates the global presence of a company (or a product/service).