State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – December 2009

Welcome to the twelfth 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 is the same as last, primarily Twitter Search but also from Twitter directly. 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.

For December 2009:

# of local users: 5517 (a decrease of 333 from November)

To clarify, that means there were 5517 users who posted at least one tweet in December 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.

Here are the rest of the stats for December 2009:

# of tweets by local users: 296590
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 20024 (6.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 107402 (36.2%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 65938 (22.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 19374 (6.5%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 10434 (3.5%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

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

Here are the number of local users by community (besides Edmonton itself) for December:

Keep in mind that is based entirely on the text inside the location field of the user’s profile, and is definitely a minimum. Still, gives you an idea of the breakdown.

Some other interesting stats for the month:

• Here are the ten users who posted the most locally tagged tweets (#yeg, #yegtraffic, etc.; most tweets first): WeatherEdmonton, yegtraffic, edmontonjournal, iNews880, livingsanctuary, DebraWard, cbcedmonton, Tamara_Stecyk, Sirthinks, BrentWelch
• The ten most active local users (most tweets first): Gen22, steenyweeny, rootnl2k, SkydivingWizard, CommonSenseSoc, trinamlee, bevurlee, EdmontonCP, FWEE4U, troublegoats
• The ten most replied to local users (most replied to first): britl, ZoomJer, akomuzikera, bevurlee, stygldpnyby, Sirthinks, grempel, CommonSenseSoc, angelzilla, bingofuel
• Just under 52% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
• Local users posted roughly 6.7 tweets per minute in December, compared with 6.7 per minute in November.
• The day with the most local tweets posted was December 4 at 11845. On average, 9568 tweets were posted each day (compared with 9685 in November).
• Of the 107402 replies posted by local users this month, 39367 or 36.7% were to other local users.
• A total of 1159 local users posted 50 times or more this month. In comparison, 761 local users posted just once this month.

Final Thoughts

Big decline in active users this month, which isn’t all that surprising given that many people spent a significant portion of it on holidays! Christmas Day had the lowest number of tweets posted, at just 6496, but it picked up again by New Year’s Eve. We finished 2009 with roughly 6.5 times more active users than we started with, and roughly 6 times as many tweets being posted each month.

Since January, I have identified just over 13,800 local users. The number above, 5517, is how many of them were active in December.

Calgary stats are up next, followed by the 2009 year-in-review stats. Stay tuned!