State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – April 2009

Welcome to the fourth 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.

As you’ll see in a couple of the graphs below, Twitter Search was down for just over 3 hours on April 19th (from about 8:48 PM until 11:51 PM MST), so tweets posted during that period of time were not counted.

For April 2009:

# of local users: 4489 (an increase of 31% over March)

To clarify, that means there were 4489 users who posted at least one tweet in April 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.

# of tweets by local users: 184015
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 9815 (5.3%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 65984 (35.9%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 31056 (16.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 7064 (3.8%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 8118 (4.4%)

To clarify the # of tweets containing #yeg – that number actually includes all the local hashtags that start with #yeg, so it includes #yegfood, #yegtraffic, etc. This is consistent with the stats for previous months, though it made less of an impact before. I’ll try to break out the stats by tag next month.

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the number of local users created per day in April, using the best available data from Twitter:

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): AndyGroenink, DebraWard, akomuzikera, TrinaMLee, Edmontonsun, fcedmonton, Etown_Jenn, britl, bingofuel, wickedmickey
• About 52% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
• Local users posted roughly 4.3 tweets per minute in April, compared with 3.4 per minute in March.
• The day with the most local tweets posted was April 23rd at 8069. On average, 6134 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 4876 in March).
• Of the 65984 replies posted by local users this month, 24916 or 38% were to other local users.
• A total of 808 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 796 local users posted just once this month.

I’m not including the top ten users by # of followers this month because I haven’t been able to update it yet, and I suspect it hasn’t changed much anyway. Also, I hope to have a dynamic list available soon.

Instead, I have a new top ten as suggested by the Social Web Meetup gang (thanks to @britl for letting me know). Here are the ten “most replied to” local users for April 2009: britl, bingofuel, chrislabossiere, citizenfish, Sirthinks, JodieGiese, frostedbetty, angelzilla, mastermaq, Out_Inc. This stat obviously skews toward the chatty, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Tomorrow, I should be posting the stats for Calgary. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Here are the Calgary stats for April 2009.