State of the Calgary Twittersphere – May 2009

Welcome to the third State of the Calgary Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary. You can see last month’s stats here. Apologies for posting this so far into June, but my travelling over the last few weeks made it difficult to do. Better late than never!

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.

I’m not sure what happened on May 15th, but I seem to be missing data for that day (the same system imports data for both Calgary and Edmonton, and the Edmonton stats were unaffected).

For May 2009:

# of local users: 5861 (an increase of 210 over April)

To clarify, that means there were 5861 users who posted at least one tweet in May 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: 209260
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 3228 (1.5%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 74979 (35.8%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 43354 (20.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 6593 (3.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 9459 (4.5%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the number of local users created per day in May, using the best available data from Twitter (it seems to be really unreliable, I will probably drop this stat next month):

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): mrrocknroll, burstingenergy, C_DIG, strategicsense, birdalert, wikkiwild1, bish0p, aprilcandy70, SalBarguil, iKasperr
• Just over 52% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
• Local users posted roughly 4.7 tweets per minute in May, compared with 4.6 per minute in April.
• The day with the most local tweets posted was May 5th at 9114. On average, 6824 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 6561 in April).
• Of the 74979 replies posted by local users this month, 16327 or 22% were to other local users.
• A total of 847 users posted 50 times or more in May. In comparison, 1085 users posted just once.

Here are the ten most replied to local users for May: C_DIG, mrrocknroll, ubershmoo, caninez, amacisaac, jonincalgary, aNorthernSoul, eviltera, darylcognito, CdnCowgirl

Analysis

Like the Edmonton stats for May, it might appear at first as though Twitter growth in Calgary has stagnated. Instead, I think there’s just some attrition taking place. There were 1879 users who posted at least one tweet in May that did not post a tweet in April (so presumably they are new). Likewise, there were 1635 users who posted at least one tweet in April that did not post a tweet in May (so presumably they abandoned the service).

In total, I have identified just over 8000 local users since March – the number above, 5861, is how many of them are currently active.