Welcome to the second 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 this data remains the same. Using Twitter Search I collected anything posted by Edmontonians, or about Edmonton. If a user has his or her location set to Edmonton, St. Albert, Sherwood Park, Leduc, Nisku, Stony Plain, 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.
There was confusion about which numbers were local or general in last month’s post, so I’ve focused in on local numbers this time. For February 2009:
# of local users: 1314 (an increase of 54% over January)
To clarify, that means there were 1314 users who posted at least one tweet in February 2009 with their location set to something that makes them an Edmontonian as described above.
# of tweets by local users: 72748
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 2489 2231
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 29282 28212
# of tweets by local users containing links: 16922 13318
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 1577 1468
This graph shows the (incorrect) above numbers compared to the same numbers from last month:
Of the 463 additional local users I identified in February, only 320 were new accounts created during the month. The other 143 users had existing accounts and either didn’t post in January, or only changed their location to something matching a local user in February. This graph shows the new user creation by day:
On the 18th, Twitter added a new property to the results returned by Twitter Search – the source. That means I was able to identify the clients that local users use most when posting updates. The top five are: web, TweetDeck, twitterfeed, TwitterBerry, and twitterrific. Note that web source actually includes all unidentified API calls too.
Some other interesting statistics for the month:
- The ten most active local users (most tweets first): fcedmonton, angelzilla, britl, mastermaq, justNICKI, adampatterson, Pat_Lorna, foomanizer, AndyGroenink, and JodieGiese.
- Just over 55% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
- Local users posted roughly 1.8 tweets per minute in February.
- The day with the most local tweets posted was February 26th at 3742. On average, 2598 local tweets were posted each day.
- Of the 29282 replies posted by local users this month, 13141 or 45% were to other local users.
- Just 343 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 164 local users posted just once this month.
And finally, the top ten users in Edmonton (as of March 1st) by # of followers: Pat_Lorna, mastermaq, LesM, redneckmommy, cleversimon, melanienathan, babyrumps, saralees, jerryreeder, revtrev
I knew the number of local users would increase this month, but I had no idea by how much. With a sudden interest in Twitter in the local media, I expect the growth for March to be even larger.
I hope you enjoyed this unscientific look at the Edmonton Twittersphere! I have done my best to provide accurate numbers, but I can’t give any guarantees. If you have any suggestions or other feedback, please let me know.
UPDATE: Great suggestion from @britl – the total number of twooshes (tweets that are exactly 140 chars) posted by local users in February 2009: 2233
MasterMaq's Blog 
That’s awesome Mack. You do a great service to your city by providing these stats. It makes it easier to show other people how main stream Twitter is becoming.
Here’s a thought, it would be interesting to compare Edmonton to other cities around the world? What city has the most active (per capita) twitterers? It would add an interesting dimension to the statistics. (and probably a billion extra hours of work…so I won’t blame you if it doesn’t happen.)
-Paul
This is the only list I ever make lol. Interesting to see the growth… thanks for keeping track Mack 😉
Thanks both!
Paul – I am tracking Calgary stats for March, but yeah, it would be a ton of work to do lots of cities. I agree it would be incredibly interesting though!
Cool to see where the increase happened! I wasn’t nearly online as much in February!
A quote from above:
“Using Twitter Search I collected anything posted by Edmontonians, or about Edmonton. If a user has his or her location set to Edmonton, St. Albert, Sherwood Park, Leduc, Nisku, Stony Plain, or matching lat/long coordinates, they are considered an Edmontonian.”
Fort Saskatchewan not on the list. I’ll still assume I’m included anyways. 🙂
Hmm you’re in the data set, but perhaps not accounted for correctly. I’ll make sure it includes Fort Saskatchewan next month! Thanks!
Excellent.
Just wondering, are you considering people with coordinates on the location field? I’ve seen some iphone twitter clients doing that.
Great work and thanks for sharing 🙂
Thanks for sharing.
Local & international news on twitter is spreading – saw an ABC report & CTV newsworld report a couple weeks ago. The word is spreading.
Egads! I’ve fallen off as one of the most active Tweeters!
Very interesting data. It’ll be interesting to see the data in a year’s time.
We’ve fallen off the list! This will not be tolerated.
Expect improvement in March.
Also – @britl adds that she’s very excited to be #3 for posts again this month. Angel better watch her back. 🙂
– blb
I’m super suprised that I still made the top 10…since this month i tweeted just over half i had the previous month…
btw…i don’t think @britl well have a chance to catch up to @angelzilla
Ivan – Yes, I am capturing all matching lat/long coordinates, such as those entered by the iPhone.
iNews880 – You weren’t far behind the top ten actually!
Foomanizer – No one has a hope of catching @angelzilla…she almost beat the fcedmonton bot this month!
How far is not far?
Also – the masses want to know… how many Twooshes were made this month by Edmontonians?
Oooh great question! I’ll see if I can bring that stat with me to the Social Web Meetup tonight! Then I’ll update the post.
The iNews880 account was 12th for the month, less than 20 tweets behind #10.
Are you really this bored?
Lots of good info here. Hoping the numbers improve and we get more people out to the meetups!!!
@mastermaq
Thanks for addressing. 😀
@iNews880
Twooshes are awesome! There was an online stats thing that told you how many you did to your account… totally forget the name of it, however. Anyone know?
TweetStats will tell you the #: http://tweetstats.com/
this is really neat, mack.
thank you for doing this