Growing the Steemit Base: An Opportunity in the Spanish Speaking Community

How widespread is Steemit?

A few weeks ago, @furion posted a great article highlighting the adoption of Steemit in the Korean speaking community. This is great news for Steemit if it wants to continue growing worldwide! Here is a link to @furion's article in case you did not catch it: https://steemit.com/steemit/@furion/steemit-s-adoption-in-non-english-speaking-world.

Within that article, @furion had a homework assignment: "Try to find out how many people in the world speak these languages, and re-normalize the percentages accordingly."

Calculating Normalized Percentages

I was able to track down some rough estimates online and want to share my normalized results here, as I think they are very interesting and indicate an opportunity to broaden the Steemit base in the Spanish speaking community.

To backtrack a little, this was a graphic from @furion's article which breaks down the languages of Steemit posts.

From the graph you can see that the majority of posts on Steemit are in English, which is not too surprising given the large number of people that speak English across the world. I wanted to normalize these numbers to identify which languages are statistically over-represented on Steemit and those that are under-represented to identify communities that Steemit may be currently missing.

In an effort to calculate normalized numbers, I performed Google searches to estimate the number of people worldwide that speak a specific language as their primary language. These were the numbers:

• World Population - 7.5 billion
• English speakers worldwide - 1.5 billion or 20%
• Korean speakers worldwide - 77.2 million or 1%
• Spanish speakers worldwide - 472 million or 6.3%
• German speakers worldwide - 95 million or 1.3%
• Indonesia speakers worldwide - 43 million or 0.57%
• Croatian speakers worldwide - 5.6 million or 0.07%
• Polish speakers worldwide - 39 million or 0.5%

To calculate normalized numbers, I divided the numbers from @furion's post by the number of individuals that speak that language as their primary language. This produced the following normalized percentages:

• Korean - 5.2
• English - 4.4
• Croatian - 4.0
• Indonesia - 1.3
• Spanish - 0.4
• Polish - 0.4

A normalized number above 1 indicates that those languages are well represented on Steemit. A number below 1 indicates those languages are not as well represented on Steemit and that there is room to grow in those communities. Ideally, the percentage of posts of a given language should reflect the percentage of individuals that speak that language worldwide, having a normalized value of 1.

An opportunity presents itself in the Spanish speaking community

From these normalized results, there is a good number of Korean and Croatian speakers in the Steemit community. This is great news! There is room to expand Steemit into the Spanish speaking community, however, having a normalized value of 0.4.

This is highlighted in a recent post by @ned in which he shows a map of Steemit activity worldwide. Here is that post: https://steemit.com/steemit/@ned/a-selfie. In that post, @ned presented this map. 

You can see from the map that there is less activity in Central America and Spain compared to other areas of the world. I know there are efforts to expand Steemit in these regions of the world. For example, @luzcypher is currently in Mexico recruiting others to Steemit and is posting in both English and Spanish. @cervantes is another great ambassador. I am sure there are many others, but I am relatively new to Steemit myself. Please respond to this post if you are in these areas of the world.

There are at least 472 million Spanish speakers in the world. Lets bring them all onto Steemit! Thank you for all those working hard to expand Steemit worldwide. Your work is greatly appreciated!

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