Twitter was the world’s fastest-growing social platform in 2012, adding an incredible 40 percent more active users between Q2 and Q4 of last year.

Indeed, that same study suggested that Twitter now has a heady 288 million active profiles, with the micro-blogging network boasting a commanding presence in almost every major country around the globe.

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Twitter was the world’s fastest-growing social platform last year, with the micro-blogging network’s 40 percent active user growth between Q2 and Q4 of 2012 more than enough to push Facebook and Google+ into second and third place respectively.

Twitter grew significantly in many countries, with active user gains of more than 50 percent in Hong Kong, Russia and China, but, after a couple of years of stagnation, it’s Twitter’s huge advance in the U.S. that is perhaps its most incredible feat to date.

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Twitter beat Facebook and Google+ as the fastest-growing social network in 2012, suggests a new study from GlobalWebIndex.

Overall, Twitter is now ranked fourth amongst all social networking sites in total active users, with Google+ securing a surprising second place.

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Since it first opened its doors to the general public back in July 2006, Twitter has expanded rapidly around the world, quickly establishing itself as the de facto micro-blogging network in almost every major country.

In August we looked at a study that suggested, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the bulk of Twitter’s 500 million (and growing) registered membership was located in the USA, with some 141.8 million users.

But what about active users? Which country heads that table?

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Disclaimer: Because the company isn’t exactly forthcoming with registration data, calculating Twitter’s userbase is as much guesswork as it is science, so take this analysis with the usual hefty pinch. That as it is, there is some history here, so bear that in mind too.

As you may have seen, Facebook has been tipped to reach one billion active users in August of this year. That’s an absolutely amazing number – approximately 14 percent of the world’s population. What’s even more impressive is these are active users, Facebook’s definition of which is people who log in at least once a month. Which doesn’t seem particularly active, to be honest, but this has essentially become the industry standard now.

So how does Twitter compare?

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Yesterday Twitter proudly announced that it has 100 million active users on the network. This is a pretty healthy statistic, and certainly a lot higher than the touted 21 million active users that was doing the rounds earlier this year.

Twitter, like its peers in the social space, defines an active user as somebody who logs on just once per month. But what about all users, including those who are less active than this? A couple of weeks back I estimated that Twitter’s total membership tally (all registered profiles) should be around the 254 million mark. From this we can deduce that approximately 40 percent of Twitter’s total users are active.

So how does that compare to the other major social networks?

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An interesting update over on the official Twitter blog, where analytics lead Kevin Weil looks at the growth of the network over the past three years in terms of numbers of tweets per day.

Kevin notes that all accounts identified as spam have been removed from this data, which makes the results even more impressive.

On a year-by-year basis, Kevin notes that Twitter has grown from just 5,000 tweets per day in 2007, to 35 million in 2009, and 50 million as of January this year.

Twitter has a habit of flat-lining pretty quickly after stellar growth, but given we’ve already seen a 43% rise in daily tweets in just a couple of months, and 200% since July, it doesn’t seem too fantastical to set a target of 100 million tweets per day before the end of the year. That’s 1,200 per second, if you’re counting.

Perhaps less impressively – assuming my estimations of 25 million active and bonafide users are accurate – that’s just four per profile, per day. Which equates to only two per day, at the current levels. If the active user numbers are as high as 75 million as some have suggested, that would mean just 1.33 tweets per day per person to hit the magic hundred. Given I do forty or so per day myself, I’m pretty sure that between us we can cope, even if a bunch of you continue taking a siesta.

Of course, if Twitter would actually release the active user data, that would make crunching these numbers just that little bit easier. All this guesswork is getting just a wee bit tiresome.