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State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – May 2009

By Mack D. Male | June 16, 2009 at 10:00 am

Welcome to the fifth State of the Edmonton Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton. You can see last month’s stats here. Apologies for posting this so far into June, but my travelling over the last few weeks made it difficult to do. Better late than never!

The source of the data this month remains the same – Twitter Search. If a user has his or her location set to Edmonton, St. Albert, Sherwood Park, Leduc, Nisku, Stony Plain, Fort Saskatchewan, Beaumont, Spruce Grove, or matching lat/long coordinates, they are considered an Edmontonian. If a tweet is “about Edmonton” it contains either the word Edmonton, the #yeg hashtag, or both.

For May 2009:

# of local users: 4513 (an increase of just 24 users over April, see analysis below)

To clarify, that means there were 4513 users who posted at least one tweet in May 2009 with their location set to something that makes them an Edmontonian as described above. This number should be treated as a minimum – there are probably many more Edmonton users without their location set.

# of tweets by local users: 197713
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 10709 (5.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 72789 (36.8%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 34315 (17.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 8833 (4.5%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 7804 (3.9%)

Once again, the number of tweets containing #yeg actually includes all local hashtags, such as #yegtransit or #yegfood (though most often they are used together anyway).

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the number of local users created per day in May, using the best available data from Twitter (it seems to be really unreliable, I will probably drop this stat next month):

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates (remember that web includes all unidentified API calls too):

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Here are the ten most replied to local users for May: britl, akomuzikera, foomanizer, Sirthinks, ZoomJer, bingofuel, angelzilla, mzflip82, frostedbetty, JodieGiese.

Analysis

It looks as though Twitter growth in Edmonton has come to a halt – the number of users who posted something this month only increased by 24 over last month! Clearly more than 24 local users signed up for Twitter last month, however. I think what’s actually happening is that a sizeable number of local users have abandoned Twitter.

There were 1387 users who posted at least one tweet in May that did not post a tweet in April (so presumably they are new). Likewise, there were 1306 users who posted at least one tweet in April that did not post a tweet in May (so presumably they abandoned the service). The difference is larger than 24 because I have better information about the April stats than I did a month ago, but for simplicity, I compare above to the number from last month’s post.

In total, I have identified nearly 7000 local users since January – the number above, 4513, is how many of them are currently active.

I’ll be posting the May stats for Calgary in the next couple days. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: You can see the Calgary stats for May here.




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Categories: Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

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8 Responses to “State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – May 2009”

  1. Jeff Says:
    June 16th, 2009 at 10:32 am

    Thanks again for giving us a census of the #yeg population.

  2. Brittney Says:
    June 16th, 2009 at 10:35 am

    Mack posted the stats… all is right in the world.

    Mack, we’re lucky to have you to put these together for us. It really is much appreciated.

    It’s interesting to see the attrition rate for our city. It looks like Edmonton can’t escape the first month rule. As most of us have heard, it’s been reported that 60% of Twitter users leave after their first month. It’s surprising to me that so many people aren’t staying, but, look how many people sign up, leave, then come back.

    And we did have quite a boom with all the media attention, Oprah, and CNN vs Ashton, so… maybe it’s a good thing we’re shaking all those ‘bandwaggoners’ off. ;)

  3. Mack D. Male Says:
    June 16th, 2009 at 11:16 am

    Yeah agreed Brittney…I am sure we’ll see more booms in the future too.

  4. Mark Says:
    June 16th, 2009 at 11:24 am

    Thanks for putting this all together! This is awesome and a great example of some of the best things about Blogs.

    The attrition rate is something we deal with a ton. We get lots of authors, small business owners who try to write a blog, have a twitter feed but get depressed and bail after a month of getting no followers. People have this idea that all you need to do is write and people will instantly find you, but unless your already a huge deal, this just won’t happen. The general public doesn’t get shown the crucial step towards having a significant blog or twitter feed – joining the community. I’d feel safe wagering quite a bit that the quitters and people who never comment or follow other peoples work are the same group.

    Thanks again for all this info!

  5. Mack D. Male Says:
    June 16th, 2009 at 11:26 am

    Yeah there’s definitely something to be said for persistence. I know all about that!

  6. State of the Calgary Twittersphere – May 2009 at MasterMaq’s Blog Says:
    June 18th, 2009 at 10:01 am

    [...] the Edmonton stats for May, it might appear at first as though Twitter growth in Calgary has stagnated. Instead, I think [...]

  7. Technology news - Techvibes Blog Says:
    June 18th, 2009 at 4:39 pm

    [...] Edmonton far outpaces Calgary with the use of the local hashtag with 5.4% of total tweets in Edmonton containing the #yeg hashtag (according to the May State of the Edmonton Twittersphere report).  [...]

  8. Greg Gazin Says:
    July 17th, 2009 at 11:13 am

    Mack, Thanks for the stats! Much appreciated!

    I think a few people signed up because of the local media coverage but decided it wasn’t for them.

    Greg

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