State of the Calgary Twittersphere – June 2009

Welcome to the fourth 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.

For June 2009:

# of local users: 5646 (a decrease of 215 from May)

To clarify, that means there were 5646 users who posted at least one tweet in June 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. See additional analysis below.

# of tweets by local users: 207245
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 4269 (2.1%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 68737 (33.2%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 48114 (23.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 6637 (3.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 8865 (4.3%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates (remember that web includes all unidentified API calls too). A notable new entry is UberTwitter:

Since I’ve been playing with some temperature data from Environment Canada lately, I decided to plot the average temperature against the number of tweets for each day in June:

Do people tweet more when it’s colder outside? I’m not sure the graph really tells us. What’s clear however is that people tweet less on the weekends!

Some other interesting stats for the month:

• The ten most active local users (most tweets first): mrrocknroll, twitty7x, Kiamba, strategicsense, ThankASoldier, C_DIG, ubershmoo, youthjuice1111, steenyweeny, iKasperr
• The ten most replied to local users (most replied to first): C_DIG, Kiamba, ChelseySyrnyk, mrrocknroll, jonincalgary, nscafe, darylcognito, djkelly, ubershmoo, Chazzy84
• Just over 52% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
• Local users posted roughly 4.8 tweets per minute in June, compared with 4.7 per minute in May.
• The day with the most local tweets posted was June 17th at 8725. On average, 6908 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 6824 in May).
• Of the 68737 replies posted by local users this month, 18206 or 26% were to other local users.
• A total of 908 users posted 50 times or more in June. In comparison, 850 users posted just once.

Finally, here are the top ten users in Calgary by followers (most followers first): douglasi, OksanaIrwin, ahhhgolf, twitty7x, strategicsense, CrazyMechanic, broatch, nolanmatthias, ThankASoldier, tessaru

Analysis

Like the Edmonton stats for this month, the Calgary stats don’t look that impressive. Some people have abandoned Twitter, it’s the summer, and as was pointed out in the comments on the Edmonton post, the Iran Election probably impacted my stats as some users changed their location to Tehran.

There are some encouraging signs, however. The increase in tagged tweets this month surprised me – maybe #yyc will try to catch up to #yeg! Also, since I started recording the stats for Calgary back in March, I have identified just over 11,000 local users. The number above, 5646, is how many of them were active in June.

I didn’t monitor things as closely in June as I do normally, so there’s a chance I might not have captured all of the data. In particular, I’m not sure if June 13th/14th was really that low or if there was a data import error of some kind. Either way, I think the data above represents the overall trends accurately.

I’ll be making some changes to hopefully boost the accuracy of the numbers in July.