State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – 2009 Year in Review

Welcome to the State of the Edmonton Twittersphere: 2009 Year in Review, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton in 2009!

I’ve done my best to ensure that everything is accurate, but take all the data you see here with a grain of salt. If I make any changes, I’ll update at the bottom of the post.

The source of the data is a combination of Twitter and Twitter Search. 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.

If you compare the monthly statistics here to my monthly State of the Edmonton Twittersphere posts, you’ll notice they are slightly different. The monthly posts represent a snapshot – over the year I got better at identifying local users, retrieving missing updates, etc. This posts reflects the most up-to-date information I have been able to gather.

Summary

I identified just over 14,000 local users who posted at least one tweet in 2009. In December, I identified 5654 local users who posted at least one tweet throughout the month. Our peak for active users was in November, at 5989.

Here are the 2009 summarized statistics:

# of tweets by local users: 2,410,017
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 138,047 (5.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 868,722 (36.0%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 477,637 (19.8%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 112,463 (4.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 84,180 (3.5%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

And here’s a closer look at the total number of tweets posted by local users per month:

The 2.4 million tweets posted by local users in 2009 works out to about 4.6 tweets per minute. Just over half (52.2%) all of tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.

Hashtags

Starting in mid-July, I improved the way my systems track hashtags. Looking at the data now, I’m struck by the sheer number of hashtags that have been used by local users! From mid-July through December of 2009, I identified 29,469 unique hashtags. Here are the top ten:

1. #yeg
2. #Oilers
3. #ff
4. #ableg
5. #followfriday
6. #yegtraffic
7. #fb
8. #fun140
9. #edmonton
10. #yyc

Of course, #yeg is far and away the most popular. To put it into perspective:

Here’s what the tag cloud looks like without the top ten hashtags:

Another interesting stat related to hashtags: there were 437 unique tags used that started with #yeg. Here are the top ten:

1. #yegtraffic
2. #yegfood
3. #yegtransit
4. #yegfringe
5. #yegchange
6. #yegcc
7. #yegphoto
8. #yegfoodbank
9. #yegsafetymtg
10. #yegtweetup

The average length of a hashtag (excluding the #) was 11.25 characters, while the most common hashtag length was 9 characters. Hashtags four characters or less in length were used 2.25 times more than hashtags ten characters or more in length.

Clients

Twitter started reporting the client used to post updates in mid-February, so the data below is for almost the entire year. In total, I identified 754 different clients that were used by local users to post updates. Here are the top ten:

1. web
2. TweetDeck
3. UberTwitter
4. TwitterFon/EchoFon
5. Tweetie
6. txt
7. Twitterrific
8. twitterfeed
9. TwitterBerry
10. mobile web

Here they are in graphic form:

In total, the Twitter website accounted for 39.2% of all updates. The top ten clients together accounted for 82.2% of all updates.

Users

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

1. revtrev
2. Pat_Lorna
3. wearestereos
4. DrBarryLycka
5. subunit1
6. LesM
7. DarleneV
8. dragonage
9. dancinginlife
10. redneckmommy

There are 181 users with 1000 followers or more, and 1449 users with 100 followers or more.

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

1. DaBaby
2. revtrev
3. dragonage
4. redneckmommy
5. dancinginlife
6. paradepro
7. Pat_Lorna
8. lealea
9. gsiemens
10. wearestereos

There are 2799 users who appear on at least one list. Among those, the average user appears on ten lists.

Here are the top ten most active local users:

1. bevurlee
2. britl
3. angelzilla
4. AndyGroenink
5. TrinaMLee
6. Gen22
7. GeneralTekno
8. stygldpnyby
9. FWEE4U
10. akomuzikera

The top one hundred active local users posted 27.2% of all tweets.

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

1. britl
2. bevurlee
3. angelzilla
4. bingofuel
5. ZoomJer
6. akomuzikera
7. mastermaq
8. stygldpnyby
9. Sirthinks
10. frostedbetty

Here are the top ten most active local users using #yeg:

1. iNews880
2. edmontonjournal
3. Sirthinks
4. mastermaq
5. ZoomJer
6. ctvedmonton
7. cbcedmonton
8. BrentWelch
9. DebraWard
10. livingsanctuary & britl

Twitter Posts

Here are some of the interesting Twitter-related posts I wrote in 2009:

• Twitter 101
• Edmonton Media Organizations on Twitter
• Twitter lovers: watch out for baseball bats!
• The Edmonton City Centre Airport debate on Twitter
• #yeg – Year in Review
• The Last 24 Hours on Twitter: Storm in Edmonton
• Reporting live in a world with Twitter

Final Thoughts

I’m continually amazed by the local Twitter community here in Edmonton! Local users have used Twitter to meet one another, to do business, to effect change, and to support the less fortunate, among other things. The community is not led by anyone, instead it self-organizes, and because of that it has accomplished some amazing things. I can’t wait to see what 2010 brings!

Something to watch for in 2010: geotagged tweets (sending your latitude and longitude along with your tweet, usually via your mobile phone). By default, geotagging is disabled on Twitter, you must enable it in your settings. Thus far, just 270 local users have done so.

Thanks for reading my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere posts over the last year!