Twitter statistics for City Council’s vote on the financial framework for the downtown arena

By Mack D. Male · October 27, 2011 at 11:55pm

After a long public hearing on Tuesday, City Council yesterday debated the proposed financial framework and ultimately whether or not they wanted to proceed with the downtown arena project. They voted 10-3 in favor of the framework, and also voted to spend $30 million to complete the design to 60%. Here’s my analysis of the the arena-related tweets posted by Edmonton users between 9:30am and 9:30pm.

By graphing the tweets per minute, you can very clearly see the time the vote took place (~3:03pm):

I was curious to know if the things people were tweeting before and after that moment were different. Here’s a word cloud of the tweets prior to the vote:

Caterina was mentioned a lot, which makes sense considering he turned out to be the surprise dealmaker of the day. The other Councillors were mentioned quite frequently too, as myself and others tweeted their comments.

Here’s a word cloud of the tweets posted after the vote:

It’s very interesting that “Edmonton” was tweeted so often after the vote passed. There were a lot of tweets similar to “Edmonton will get a new arena” that were retweeted after the vote. You can also see that “Iveson” was fairly prominent after the vote, reflecting the large number of tweets about his final remarks on the deal.

Other stats:

It was another busy day for tweets in Edmonton with more than 42,000 posted by Edmontonians. That works out to an average of about 30 per minute.
More than 880 users posted at least one arena-related tweet.
On average, 5.0 arena-related tweets were posted per minute between 9:30am and 9:30pm. The peak was 43.
Roughly 14% of the tweets were replies to other users.
Roughly 29% of the tweets were retweets.

Here are the top 20 most active local users (most tweets to least):

Here are the top 20 most retweeted local users (by other local users, most retweeted to least):

I gave Paula a run for her money, but she remained the most retweeted user on the arena issue!

UPDATE: I’m always looking for better ways to analyze tweets. Finding a good, reliable way to do sentiment analysis (are tweets positive or negative) is a challenge, partially because tweets are so short and because they usually include weird entities like hashtags (weird from a natural language processing point-of-view). To analyze the arena-related tweets, I used uClassify’s Sentiment Classifier. Here are the results:

I would say this is pretty much as expected. Tweets before the vote probably expressed less emotion one way or the other. Most people tweeting after the vote seemed happy with the decision Council made.

Twitter statistics for today’s public hearing on the proposed arena deal

By Mack D. Male · October 25, 2011 at 11:59pm

I think it’s fair to say that the public hearing on the proposed arena deal was the talk of Twitter in Edmonton today. Here’s my quick analysis of all arena-related tweets posted by Edmonton users today between 9:30am and 9:30pm.

A word cloud of the 4500+ tweets:

Here’s a breakdown of tweets per minute (you can clearly see the lunch and dinner breaks):

Other stats:

Thanks largely to the arena-related tweets, more than 44,000 tweets were posted by Edmontonians today. That works out to an average of about 31 tweets per minute.
More than 800 different users posted at least one arena-related tweet.
On average, 6.3 arena-related tweets were posted per minute between 9:30am and 9:30pm. The peak was 24.
Roughly 17% of the tweets were replies to other users.
Roughly 25% of the tweets were retweets.

Here are the top 20 most active local users (most tweets to least):

Here are the top 20 most retweeted local users (by other local users, most retweeted to least):

Council voted to deal with the issue at 9:30am tomorrow (Wednesday). You can watch or listen live here.

Edmonton Twittersphere: One Week, Three Big Events

By Mack D. Male · May 4, 2011 at 5:38pm

There certainly has been a lot to talk about over the last seven days! The royal wedding, the death of Osama bin Laden, and the 41st Canadian federal election have all been in the news around the world. They’ve been the hot topics on Twitter as of late too. I decided to take a closer look at Edmonton’s tweeting of the three events.

First, here is the number of tweets about each topic, plotted per hour over the last week. From the chart, we can see that the Bin Laden and election news was spikier than the royal wedding (think: people tweeting as soon as they heard about Bin Laden versus people tweeting over the three or four hours the wedding took).

For the data labeled #RoyalWedding I took any tweet that contained “wedding”, “middleton”, “cambridge”, “william”, or “kate”. For the data labeled Bin Laden, I took any tweet that contained “bin laden”, “binladen”, “osama”, or “obama”. For the data labeled “#elxn41” I took any tweet that contained “elxn41” or “yegfed”. This definition applies to the rest of the data in this post as well.

Here’s a closer look at the royal wedding tweets:

Obviously one of the more interesting aspects of the royal wedding was that it took place in the middle of the night for us here in Edmonton. This chart gives you a sense of that. The orange line is the number of tweets posted per hour on April 29th, and you can see there were quite a few more tweets posted in the middle of the night than either the day before or after (the blue lines).

Here’s a word cloud that shows all of the local tweets posted on April 29th (29,625). You can see the wedding definitely stands out:

The most consistently talked about topic of the three has definitely been the election. We set a new record for the number of tweets posted in a single day on election day (May 2) at 37,664. That’s fitting, considering our record day last year was also an election day. This chart compares the two:

Obviously more tweets were posted overall on May 2, because there are more local users on Twitter now. What’s interesting to me is that the number of election-specific tweets is about the same for both!

Here’s a word cloud for election day:

Though more people tweeted about the election over the week, it was the Bin Laden news that got everyone tweeting at the same time. I think it’s the new local record holder for peak tweets per hour:

This chart is imperfect, of course – it changes depending on the search keywords you use. But I think it still illustrates the point. For Crosby’s goal, I used “canada”, “crosby”, “goal”, and “score”.

Finally, here’s a word cloud for May 1, the day the Osama bin Laden news broke:

Even though the news came out very late in the day, you can see that it was the most talked about topic of the day.

I wonder what the next big event on Twitter in Edmonton will be!

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – 2010 Year in Review

By Mack D. Male · February 4, 2011 at 12:30pm

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:

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

Here are the top 25 most listed users:

The average local user has been listed 5 times.

Here are the top 25 most active users:

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):

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):

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):

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:

Here are the top 10 #yeg-related hashtags:

Clients

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

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!

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – December 2010

By Mack D. Male · February 2, 2011 at 11:00am

Welcome to the twelfth State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton, AB. You can see the stats for November here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For December 2010:

# of local users: 10198 (an increase of 259 from November)
# of tweets by local users: 529387
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 37063 (7.0%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 191871 (36.2%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 141953 (26.8%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 34255 (6.5%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 22703 (4.3%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just under 50% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 11.6 tweets per minute in December (compared to 12.2 tweets per minute in November).
The day with the most local tweets posted was December 14 at 21297. On average, 17077 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 17527 in November).
Of the 191871 replies posted by local users this month, 78509 or 40.9% were to other local users.
A total of 1923 users posted 50 times or more in December. In comparison, 1667 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most active local users (not including bots):

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yeg (not including bots):

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Here are the top ten most retweeted local users (by other local users):

Final Thoughts

Edmonton finally broke the 10,000 active user mark! Aside from that, however, it was definitely a holiday month. You can see a noticeable drop in the number of tweets posted around Christmas. Also fewer tagged tweets and more replies in December, which suggests to me less news being posted and more conversation taking place.

I should have my 2010 year-in-review up later this week. If you’re interested, stop by Twitter Talks on Thursday evening for even more twittersphere stats!

As always, keep in mind that the stats above rely upon users setting the location field of their profile to something like “Edmonton”. Users who leave that field blank or who put something like “Canada” are not reflected in the above stats.

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – November 2010

By Mack D. Male · January 31, 2011 at 11:00am

Welcome to the eleventh State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton, AB. You can see the stats for October here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For November 2010:

# of local users: 9939 (an increase of 318 from October)
# of tweets by local users: 525804
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 40905 (7.8%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 184033 (35.0%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 145767 (27.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 38958 (7.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 22722 (4.3%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just over 50% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 12.2 tweets per minute in November (compared to 12.0 tweets per minute in October).
The day with the most local tweets posted was November 23 at 20311. On average, 17527 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 17252 in October).
Of the 184033 replies posted by local users this month, 73837 or 40.1% were to other local users.
A total of 2030 users posted 50 times or more in November. In comparison, 1394 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most active local users (not including bots):

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yeg (not including bots):

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Here are the top ten most retweeted local users (by other local users):

Final Thoughts

We got really close to 10,000 users in November! The number of tweets overall was slightly lower than in October, which is partially explained by the month having one less day and partially by the election that took place in October. The average number of tweets per day was almost exactly the same as in October, however.

I should have December 2010 and my 2010 year-in-review up later this week. Also, stop by Twitter Talks on Thursday evening for even more twittersphere stats!

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – October 2010

By Mack D. Male · January 19, 2011 at 10:00am

Welcome to the tenth State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton, AB. You can see the stats for September here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For October 2010:

# of local users: 9621 (an increase of 433 from September)
# of tweets by local users: 534809
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 47851 (8.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 187975 (35.1%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 137406 (25.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 41205 (7.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 19444 (3.6%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just over 49% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 12.0 tweets per minute in October (compared to 11.7 tweets per minute in September).
The day with the most local tweets posted was October 18 at 23232. On average, 17252 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 16783 in September).
Of the 187975 replies posted by local users this month, 74095 or 39.4% were to other local users.
A total of 2035 users posted 50 times or more in September. In comparison, 1323 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most active local users (not including bots):

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yeg (not including bots):

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Here are the top ten most retweeted local users (by other local users):

Final Thoughts

October was a big month for Twitter here in Edmonton, thanks primarily to the municipal election. More users, more tweets, more tagged tweets, and more retweets. The busiest day of the month was election day (there’s a noticeable spike the in graph). Twitter was used to discuss the forums and other election-related events, to learn about the candidates, and to debate the issues. And on the big night, the candidates themselves used Twitter to capture the moment. You can see my election-related entries here.

Slowly catching up on my stats – I should have the rest of 2010 up soon.

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – September 2010

By Mack D. Male · January 18, 2011 at 10:00am

Welcome to the ninth State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton, AB. You can see the stats for August here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For September 2010:

# of local users: 9188 (an increase of 700 from August)
# of tweets by local users: 503471
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 39862 (7.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 178519 (35.5%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 131229 (26.1%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 34503 (6.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 16028 (3.2%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just under 51% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 11.7 tweets per minute in September (compared to 10.8 tweets per minute in August).
The day with the most local tweets posted was September 23 at 21096. On average, 16783 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 15536 in August).
Of the 178519 replies posted by local users this month, 69081 or 38.7% were to other local users.
A total of 1904 users posted 50 times or more in September. In comparison, 1233 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most active local users (not including bots):

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yeg (not including bots):

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Here are the top ten most retweeted local users (by other local users):

Final Thoughts

I’m not sure why there was a bit of a jump in users and in the number of tweets posted in September, except perhaps that people go from “summer” mode to “get down to business” mode. Interest in the upcoming election made have played a role as well.

As with the previous month, the number of retweets includes both new and old style, both with and without extra comments.

Slowly catching up on my stats – I should have the rest of 2010 up soon.

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – August 2010

By Mack D. Male · October 29, 2010 at 10:00am

Welcome to the eighth State of the Edmonton Twittersphere of 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton, AB. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For August 2010:

# of local users: 8488 (an increase of 261 from July)
# of tweets by local users: 481605
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 35965 (7.5%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 167831 (34.8%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 144532 (30.0%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 34282 (7.1%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 16012 (3.3%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates – BlackBerry apps really dropped off this month for some reason:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just under 51% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 10.8 tweets per minute in August (compared to 10.0 tweets per minute in July).
The day with the most local tweets posted was August 26 at 18232. On average, 15536 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 14390 in July).
Of the 167831 replies posted by local users this month, 65767 or 39.2% were to other local users.
A total of 1727 users posted 50 times or more in August. In comparison, 1199 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most active local users (not including bots):

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yeg (not including bots):

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Here are the top ten most retweeted local users (by other local users):

Final Thoughts

Better late than never right? It has been a long time since I’ve posted any Twitter stats! A vacation, the election, all kinds of stuff has kept me busy. I think the August stats represent the start of a big increase in election-related tweets. You can see a number of #ecca users in the lists above, and there were 580 tweets posted in August using the #yegvote hashtag.

For August, the number of retweets jumped quite a bit because of changes I made to my analysis code. Previously I only counted tweets that started with “RT @” or tweets that were new-style retweets (using the retweet button). This time, I counted retweets that contained additional text as well. It’s common for users to post a retweet like “LOL! RT @…” and now those are included. The number of retweets therefore jumped from 21528 (old way of calculating) to 34282 (new way of calculating).

Considering it was the end of summer, I’m a little surprised that the average number of tweets posted per day went up!

UPDATE: @burnstand pointed out that the day with the most tweets, August 26, was the day Lady Gaga was in town.

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – July 2010

By Mack D. Male · September 2, 2010 at 10:00am

Welcome to the seventh State of the Calgary Twittersphere of 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary, AB. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For July 2010:

# of local users: 10501 (a decrease of 125 from June)
# of tweets by local users: 501941
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 22956 (4.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 153421 (30.6%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 148567 (29.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 21291 (4.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 16440 (3.3%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just over 50% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 11.3 tweets per minute in July (compared to 11.7 tweets per minute in June).
The day with the most local tweets posted was July 30 at 19863. On average, 16821 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 16821 in June).
Of the 153421 replies posted by local users this month, 47364 or 30.9% were to other local users.
A total of 1960 users posted 50 times or more in July. In comparison, 1587 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users (not including bots):

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yyc (not including bots):

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Here are the top ten most retweeted local users (by other local users):

Final Thoughts

A small decrease in users in July, maybe because everyone was outside doing things! No surprise that the Calgary Stampede was among the most retweeted for the month. Chinook Centre celebrated its 50th birthday on August 1, and made a big push for followers during the month of July which likely explains why it was retweeted so much. With the Calgary election heating up, it’s interesting to see that mayoral candidate Naheed Nenshi was the 6th most retweeted user. I wonder if we’ll see more election-related stats as October 18 draws near.