State of the Calgary Twittersphere – October 2009

Welcome to the eighth 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 is the same as last, primarily Twitter Search but also from Twitter directly. 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 October 2009:

# of local users: 7283 (an increase of 139 from September)

To clarify, that means there were 7283 users who posted at least one tweet in October 2009 with their location set to something that makes them an 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.

Here are the rest of the stats for October 2009:

# of tweets by local users: 298538
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc or #calgary: 7464 (2.5%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 88740 (29.7%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 84794 (28.4%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 20120 (6.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 9133 (3.1%)

I’ve heard that some folks in Calgary use #yyc while others use #calgary, so I decided to do the stats for both this month. Of the 7464 total tagged tweets, just 934 of them used #calgary. Of those, just 381 did not also include #yyc.

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

Here are the top clients used by local users for posting updates:

Some other interesting stats for the month:

• New stat this month! Here are the ten users who posted the most locally tagged tweets (#yyc, #yyctraffic, #Calgary, etc.; most tweets first): Karaokeworld, a_picazo, C_DIG, SECalgaryNews, aldjohnmar, cityofcalgary, stuartrcrawford, BT_Calgary, that_angela, donnamct
• The ten most active local users (most tweets first, with a few bots removed): ProtruckR, Gengenw, workmanrw, scottmiller777, izzynobre, kiambas, Kristinnuendo, CalgaryCP, SalBarguil, a_picazo
• The ten most replied to local users (most replied to first): that_angela, C_DIG, Eves1, carmenincalgary, ang_J, alex_ruiz, ReaFaceToFace, myownbiggestfan, gotkube, DarciCollier
• Just under 51% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
• Local users posted roughly 6.7 tweets per minute in October, compared with 6.1 per minute in September.
• The day with the most local tweets posted was October 28th at 11472. On average, 9630 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 8722 in September).
• Of the 88740 replies posted by local users this month, 21100 or 23.8% were to other local users.
• A total of 1215 users posted 50 times or more in October. In comparison, 1216 users posted just once.

Final Thoughts

User growth was less than Edmonton this month, which doesn’t happen very often! The number of tweets posted by local users is still on the rise, however. There were 5 days in October with more than 11,000 local tweets posted.

Since March, I have identified just over 16,200 local users. The number above, 7283, is how many of them were active in October.