Welcome to the sixth State of the Edmonton Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton. You can see last month’s stats here.
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 June 2009:
# of local users: 3642 (a decrease of 871 from May)
To clarify, that means there were 3642 users who posted at least one tweet in June 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. See additional analysis below.
# of tweets by local users: 172295
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 9411 (5.5%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 64281 (37.3%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 31937 (18.5%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 7532 (4.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 6453 (3.7%)
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 top clients used by local users for posting updates (remember that web includes all unidentified API calls too, though they are changing that). A notable new entry this month is UberTwitter:
I’ve been playing with some temperature data from Environment Canada lately, and it occurred to me that I could visualize it against my Twitter data. Here is the number of tweets posted and the average temperature for each day in June:
Do people post more when it’s warmer or when it’s colder? The only thing I can be sure of is that there are always less tweets posted on the weekend. Beyond that, there seemed to be more tweets posted at the beginning of the month when temperatures were cooler, but obviously this is in no way scientific!
Some other interesting stats for the month:
- The ten most active local users (most tweets first): FWEE4U, fcedmonton, ETown_Melly, paulagroenink, AndyGroenink, britl, adampatterson, akomuzikera, wickedmickey, bingofuel.
- The ten most replied to local users (most replied to first): britl, bingofuel, JodieGiese, TheSpinDoctor, lessthanfive, adampatterson, slepp, citizenfish, sonic1029, MicheRyder.
- Just over 54% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
- Local users posted roughly 4.0 tweets per minute in June, compared with 4.4 per minute in May.
- The day with the most local tweets posted was June 8th at 7536. On average, 5743 local tweets were posted each day (compared with 6378) in May.
- Of the 64281 replies posted by local users this month, 25860 or 40% were to other local users.
- A total of 770 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 527 local users posted just once this month.
Finally, here are the top ten users in Edmonton by followers (most followers first): Pat_Lorna, revtrev, LesM, subunit1, garrymullen, mastermaq, redneckmommy, NHL_Oilers, karlkovacs, dan_cote. It would take a lot more time to generate, but a top ten list ranked by local followers would probably look much different.
Analysis
This month’s stats don’t look very good! The numbers haven’t been this low since March. There are definitely users who have abandoned Twitter, but I think the time of year probably has an effect as well. Presumably people are outside enjoying the weather, tweeting less often! A preliminary look at the numbers for July suggests to expect more of the same for next month’s stats.
The good news is that since January, I have identified nearly 9000 local users. The number above, 3642, is how many of them were active in June.
I didn’t monitor things as closely in June as I do normally, so there’s a chance I might not have captured all of the data. In particular, I’m not sure if June 14th was really that low or if there was a data import error of some kind. Either way, I think the data above represents the overall trends accurately.
I should have the stats for Calgary up by Thursday. Stay tuned!
UPDATE: The Calgary stats for June are here.
MasterMaq's Blog 
As always, thanks for doing this, Mack. TWITTER TRANSCENDS WEATHER PATTERNS. :O
one cause for a drop in #yeg users is those who changed their location to Tehran during the Iran/Twitter revolution.
This information is very helpful for those of us trying ot figure out the impact and power of social media. Much appreciated.
You will have to watch when you do July’s stats as there was a lot of traffic about the ecca without using Edmonton or #yeg tags. It will be interesting to see what the traffic did during the dog days of that debate.
Great job Mack!
rocketmunkey – good point, that likely had an impact as well!
Would the pro-Iranian election meme to switch your location/time zone have fudged your numbers at all, Mack?
Yeah I think it did, you’re right.
I have some ideas of ways to get around that…I’ll look into it 🙂
I agree that the change from #yeg to #ecca likely will have a big impact even for june 🙂
the mack has done it again! thank you!
it’s really interesting to know that the weather affect our tweeting activity.
What are you using to get the environment canada data? Do they have an API interface somewhere? I wasn’t able to find one when I looked a while ago.
If you’re going down to Leduc and Nisku you should include Wetaskiwin, Gwynne, Camrose, New Sarepta, and Hay Lakes. 🙂
Thanks for this data! great work! you might want to try throwing it at http://www.swivel.com and see how you might combine it with other data sources for further trend analysis.
Graham – You can get climate data online in CSV and XML by day or month here:
http://www.climate.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/climateData/canada_e.html
Chad – Has anyone actually set their location to one of those? 🙂 I’ll look into it.
Tom – Good idea, thanks for the link!
Good work, buddy. Tweets vs weather-very original idea! Next month compare it to the lunar cycle or price of gas!
-Jerry
I often abbreviate Edmonton to Edm and I’m sure I commented on ecca at least once without using yeg (or even a hashtag all the time). Also during the bill 44 debate, I was not using a hashtag much at all. Would ABLeg stuff count or is it considered provincial rather than Edmonton?
Currently that stuff would only be captured if your location is set to Edmonton or something similar. I plan to add #ableg however, so that it is captured even if your location is something different.
Thanks Mack for this. I have been anxiously awaiting this post for the past few months. It is a good read and I appreciate you doing this