State of the Calgary Twittersphere – April 2009

Welcome to the second State of the Calgary Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary. 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 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.

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: 5651 (an increase of 52% over March)

To clarify, that means there were 5651 users who posted at least one tweet in April 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: 196832
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 3107 (1.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 68157 (34.6%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 37838 (19.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 6373 (3.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 7894 (4.0%)

This graph shows these numbers visually:

Here are the number of local users created per day in April, using the best available data from Twitter (the spike is about the time Oprah joined):

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): strategicsense, codsta, Somecitygirl, izzynobre, C_DIG, aNorthernSoul, mrrocknroll, opiatedsherpa, wikkiwild1, caninez
• About 51% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
• Local users posted roughly 4.6 tweets per minute in April, compared with 3.3 per minute in March.
• The day with the most local tweets posted was April 22nd at 9163. On average, 6561 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 4760 in March).
• Of the 68157 replies posted by local users this month, 17250 or 25% were to other local users.
• A total of 893 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 926 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. Instead, here are the ten “most replied to” local users for April 2009: C_DIG, caninez, Somecitygirl, darylcognito, ReaFaceToFace, djkelly, amacisaac, Wendy, CdnCowgirl, jonincalgary. This stat obviously skews toward the chatty, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

If you have any comments or feedback let me know so that I can improve these statistics in future months. You can see the April 2009 stats for Edmonton here. I should have a Calgary vs. Edmonton stats post up sometime next week.