Social network Twitter grew as much as 129 percent in South Africa from August 2012 to August 2013, according to research conducted by World Wide Worx and Fuseware on the state of social media in Africa’s largest economy, BusinessTech reports.

Twitter says its user base in many international markets, including South Africa, is growing at a faster rate than in the U.S.

The online messaging service publicly filed its IPO documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday Oct. 3.

Twitter said it had 218.3 million monthly average users in the three months ending June 30, 2013 – a 44 percent increase from 151.4 million average MAUs in the same period last year.

“We have experienced significant growth in our number of users over the last several years. In general, a higher proportion of Internet users in the United States uses Twitter than Internet users in other countries,” Twitter said in its filing. “Accordingly, in the future we expect our user growth rate in certain international markets such as Argentina, France, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, to continue to be higher than our user growth rate in the United States.”

Arthur Goldstuck, MD of World Wide Worx said that South Africans post 54 million tweets per month, 85 percent of which are from mobile devices.

He said that Twitter users in South Africa climbed to 5.5-million in 2013, from 2.43-million in 2012.

Twitter said it intends to invest in its international operations in order to expand its user base and advertiser base and increase engagement and monetization internationally.

In the three months ended June 30, 2013, Twitter reported 169.1 million average MAUs internationally, compared to 49.2 million average MAUs in the United States.

In the first public disclosure of its financial results, Twitter reported that revenue almost tripled to $316.9 million in 2012. In the first half of 2013, it posted revenue of $253.6 million – but it also reported a loss of $69.3 million.

“Our financial performance has been and will continue to be significantly determined by our success in growing the number of users and increasing their overall level of engagement on our platform as well as the number of ad engagements,” Twitter said.