It’s very easy to think that the joys of Twitter are limited to the USA, UK and Western Europe, but the microblogging platform is making inroads in almost every country all around the world.

Take Africa, for example. How well has Twitter been adopted there? A new study has taken a closer look at tweeting across the world’s second-largest continent, and discovered that it’s a lot bigger than you probably thought.

In the report, Tweetminster and Portland analyzed more than 11.5 million geo-located tweets from the final three months of 2011. They discovered that South Africa leads all African countries, making up almost 44 percent of the total tweets sent, ahead of Kenya (22 percent) and Nigeria (14 percent). Egypt and Morocco rounded out the top five, but almost everywhere in Africa had some kind of presence on Twitter.

Of note: 57 percent of all tweets were sent from mobile phones.

The Guardian have also created their own visualization of the data.

(Source: Tweetminster and Portland. Hat tip: The Guardian. Top image credit: Tischenko Irina via Shutterstock.)