State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – 2010 Year in Review

Welcome to the State of the Edmonton Twittersphere: 2010 Year in Review, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton in 2010! You can see my recap of 2009 here.

I’ve done my best to ensure all of the data in this post is accurate, but I make no guarantees – use it at your own risk. The data comes from the Twitter API, and has been collected over the past year. 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, and thus a “local user”.

If you compare the monthly statistics here to my monthly State of the Edmonton Twittersphere posts, you’ll notice they are slightly different. The monthly posts represent a snapshot – this post reflects the most up-to-date information I have been able to gather as of the end of 2010.

Summary

Here are the highlights for 2010:

• There were 22,000+ local users.
• Those users posted more than 4.9 million tweets. That works out to 9.4 per minute.
• Of those 4,948,409 tweets:
  • 381,752 contained #yeg or one of the #yeg-related hashtags (like #yegfood) (7.7%)
  • 357,206 were retweets (7.2%)
  • 1,715,507 were replies (34.7%)
  • 668,368 were replies to other local users (13.5%)
  • 1,331,306 contained links (26.9%)
  • 191,060 were twooshes (exactly 140 characters) (3.9%)

Let’s look at users. While more than 22,000 local users were on Twitter last year, only 10,200 of them were active during the month of December (active means they posted at least one tweet). But that was up from just 5601 who were active during the month of January.

When 2010 started, local users were posting about 260,000 tweets per month. By the end of the year, that number had grown to more than 525,000 tweets per month.

This chart gives you a sense of the trends over the year. I think it is interesting that the lines for #yeg-related tweets and retweets are almost identical (red and green).

Roughly 50.8% of all tweets in 2010 were posted between the hours of 9 AM and 6 PM. Not surprisingly, the number of tweets posted between midnight and 7 AM is quite a bit lower than the number posted during the day and early evening. There seems to be an early morning (9-10 AM) and late night (9-10 PM) spike.

If we look at days of the week, we see that more tweets are posted on Tuesday and Wednesday than on any other day.

In the chart below I have plotted the number of tweets posted per day for each day of the year. The trend is clearly up, and the spikes and troughs reveal some interesting events. Election day, October 18, saw the most tweets posted at 23,234. On average, 13,558 tweets were posted each day in 2010.

Users

Here are the top 25 most followed users:

1. revtrev
2. Pat_Lorna
3. biofeed
4. randyfritz
5. dragonage
6. masseffect2
7. NHL_Oilers
8. wearestereos
9. DancinginLife
10. subunit1
11. MathieuBisson
12. MilesSTEREOS
13. LesM
14. patkstereos
15. todd_herman
16. hccedmonton
17. redneckmommy
18. worldprofit
19. DrBarryLycka
20. mtubes
21. paradepro
22. TSNRyanRishaug
23. garrymullen
24. mastermaq
25. DarleneV

The average local user has 120 followers. Just 420 users have more than 1000 followers.

Here are the top 25 most listed users:

1. biofeed
2. revtrev
3. randyfritz
4. NHL_Oilers
5. masseffect2
6. dragonage
7. paradepro
8. redneckmommy
9. Pat_Lorna
10. DaBaby
11. DancinginLife
12. rootnl2k
13. gsiemens
14. edmontonjournal
15. TSNRyanRishaug
16. wearestereos
17. brentcetera
18. NiCoLeKoScH
19. ctvedmonton
20. gcouros
21. cbcedmonton
22. mastermaq
23. lealea
24. CityofEdmonton
25. britl

The average local user has been listed 5 times.

Here are the top 25 most active users:

1. EdmontonBizcaf
2. WCIJobs
3. rootnl2k
4. etownmelly
5. DWsBITCH
6. Lekordable
7. ZoomJer
8. CommonSenseSoc
9. trinamlee
10. GuitarKat
11. EdmontonCP
12. gcouros
13. SaySandra
14. Jaisabella
15. frostedbetty
16. angelzilla
17. PoisonLolita
18. Edmontonsun
19. DebraWard
20. Cokebear17
21. RECEdmonton
22. Sirthinks
23. britl
24. Leask
25. fraygulrock

The top 100 most active users accounted for 18.5% of all local tweets.

Here are the top 25 most active users using #yeg (and #yeg-related hashtags):

1. yegsphere
2. edmontonjournal
3. EdmCa
4. rootnl2k
5. iNews880
6. oilersff
7. DebraWard
8. Edmontonsun
9. WeatherEdmonton
10. ctvedmonton
11. EdmontonBizcaf
12. WCIJobs
13. cbcedmonton
14. DWsBITCH
15. Sirthinks
16. ZoomJer
17. livingsanctuary
18. mastermaq
19. fraygulrock
20. yegtraffic
21. Lekordable
22. gcouros
23. BrentWelch
24. frostedbetty
25. bingofuel

The top 100 most active users using #yeg and its subtags accounted for 51.8% of all #yeg-tagged tweets.

Here are the top 25 most replied to users (by other local users):

1. ZoomJer
2. PoisonLolita
3. britl
4. CommonSenseSoc
5. Wildsau
6. angelzilla
7. RockstarJodie
8. SaySandra
9. bingofuel
10. frostedbetty
11. GuitarKat
12. Sirthinks
13. confessionality
14. KikkiPlanet
15. akomuzikera
16. Rainyfool
17. JenBanksYEG
18. DebraWard
19. FeliciaDewar
20. mastermaq
21. adampatterson
22. lonesomebilydad
23. LauraSem
24. Pokerclack
25. BrentWelch

The top 100 most replied to users accounted for 32.8% of all local replies (replies from one Edmontonian to another).

And here is what I think is the most significant list, the top 25 most retweeted users (by other local users):

1. edmontonjournal
2. ctvedmonton
3. mastermaq
4. CityofEdmonton
5. dantencer
6. cbcedmonton
7. bingofuel
8. iNews880
9. Paulatics
10. ZoomJer
11. NHL_Oilers
12. britl
13. TrafficEdmonton
14. joshclassen
15. BrentWelch
16. sonic1029
17. yegfoodbank
18. davecournoyer
19. SimonOstler
20. Edmontonsun
21. JasonGregor
22. EdmontonHumane
23. chrislabossiere
24. DebraWard
25. Sirthinks

A total of 103 users were retweeted by other local users 100 times or more. Just 18 users were retweeted by other local users 1000 times or more.

Hashtags

The most commonly used hashtag was #yeg. Local users used #yeg roughly 6.5 times more than the next most popular hashtag, which was #FF. Here’s a word cloud of the top 1000 hashtags, including #yeg:

And here are the top 1000 without #yeg:

The average length of a hashtag was 13.7 characters (including the #). There were hashtags that were just two characters, and hashtags that were 140 characters. Here are the top 10 hashtags:

1. #yeg
2. #FF
3. #oilers
4. #edmonton
5. #alberta
6. #ableg
7. #yegfood
8. #FollowFriday
9. #yegvote
10. #fb

Here are the top 10 #yeg-related hashtags:

1. #yegfood
2. #yegvote
3. #yegweather
4. #yegtraffic
5. #yegcc
6. #yegtransit
7. #yegarena
8. #yegmusic
9. #yegarts
10. #yegfringe

Clients

There were more than 2000 different clients used by local users to post tweets in 2010. Here are the top ten clients:

1. web
2. TweetDeck
3. Twitter for iPhone
4. ÜberTwitter
5. Twitter for BlackBerry®
6. Echofon
7. twitterfeed
8. HootSuite
9. API
10. Twitterrific

Text messaging was the next most popular client. Here are the top ten in graphic form (percentages are of the total number of tweets, 4.9 million):

The top ten clients accounted for 76.2% of all local tweets in 2010.

Final Thoughts

Twitter continued its impressive growth all around the world in 2010, and Edmonton was no exception. Though the number of people with Twitter accounts in Edmonton pales in comparison to the number of people with Facebook accounts, I don’t think that is necessarily the best comparison to make. You need a Facebook account to access most things on Facebook, you don’t on Twitter. Twitter reaches far beyond the 22,000+ local users with accounts.

There were lots of tweetups in 2010, but fewer and fewer focused just on Twitter. Because so many more people have joined, even non-Twitter events seem like tweetups! I thought that geolocation might play a bigger role in 2010, but it didn’t really. Just 3124 users have enabled geolocation (up from 270 in 2009). Perhaps 2011 will be the year that geotagged tweets take off? You need to enable it in your settings.

I hope you’ve found this look at the Edmonton Twittersphere in 2010 interesting and informative. Thanks for reading!