Welcome to the first State of the Calgary Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary. After receiving many requests for this from Calgarians after my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere posts, combined with my own curiosity, I figured it was time to do some stats for Calgary. I only captured half of the data for March 1st, but otherwise I think these numbers are fairly solid.
Using Twitter Search, I collected anything posted by Calgarians, or about Calgary. If a user has his or her location set to Calgary, Airdrie, Okotoks, Cochrane, Strathmore, or matching lat/long coordinates, they are considered a Calgarian. If a tweet is “about Calgary” it contains either the word Calgary, the #yyc hashtag, or both.
For March 2009:
# of local users: 3717
To clarify, that means there were 3717 users who posted at least one tweet in March 2009 with their location set to something that makes them a Calgarian as described above. This number should be treated as a minimum – there are probably many more Calgary users without their location set or that were not captured for some other reason.
# of tweets by local users: 147549
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 2936
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 51721
# of tweets by local users containing links: 28902
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 4463
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 5821
This graph shows these numbers visually:
Though perhaps a little inaccurate, here are the best numbers I could get from Twitter for the number of local users created per day during March:
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:
- The ten most active local users (most tweets first): codsta, wikkiwild1, strategicsense, yuki_hime, izzynobre, darylcognito, pigazine, MitchyD, dblacombe, devlind
- About 54% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
- Local users posted roughly 3.3 tweets per minute in March.
- The day with the most local tweets posted was March 31st at 6518. On average, 4760 local tweets were posted each day.
- Of the 51721 replies posted by local users this month, 14650 or 28% were to other local users.
- A total of 693 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 542 local users posted just once this month.
And finally, the top ten users in Calgary (as of April 11th) by # of followers: douglasi, MarkIsMusing, tessaru, VeerUpdate, nolanmatthias, strategicsense, codsta, dayhomemama, scrawforditm, CalgaryRealtor.
I may put together another post to compare Edmonton and Calgary, but in general I’d say that although Calgary seems to have more users, they don’t seem as connected to one another as Edmontonians are (as evidenced by the # of tagged tweets and replies to other local users). I’m a little surprised that #yeg is so much more active than #yyc, actually.
Thanks to @andrewmcintyre for helping me with these stats (he ranked #13 on the most active users for the month btw). If you have any comments or feedback let me know so that I can improve these statistics in future months.
MasterMaq's Blog 
I think the lack of use of #yyc might just be an artifact of Calgary tweeps perhaps not being as well-versed in the use of hashtags. I think #yeg tweeps have the benefit of some really excellent twitter power-users and maybe that’s why we use hashtags more…?
Perhaps, though don’t forget that @wintr was using #yyc long before we started using #yeg!
Interesting. Way less use of the #yyc hashtag compared to Edmonton’s #yeg.
I guess another consideration is that we have far more twitterfeed users in Edmonton, and some of them (such as @iNews880) include the #yeg hashtag.
There has been pressure to use the #yyc hashtag less because it was being constantly misused and in many people’s opinion has become somewhat convoluted and useless.
The differences between #yeg and #yyc are fascinating.It will be interesting to see if these trends persist. Thanks for taking the time to compile this data Mack.
hahah that’s cool. I don’t think the stats for most active twitter users are acurate, though – I have almost 40 thousand twitter updates, I wonder why someone with less than a third of that was considered more active than me.
Cool initiative regardless.