State of the Edmonton Twittersphere 2013: Overview

Welcome to the State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2013, my fifth look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton. You can see my previous annual recaps here: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.

In previous years, I have more or less treated the reports as connected to one another. I’d capture nearly every tweet posted by local users over the year, and compare the data to previous years, and you’d see the growth. This year is different. Twitter made changes to the part of its system that I use to gather the data, so instead of gathering most of the data, I instead was only able to gather a large sample.

The sample for this year’s report is about 13.8 million tweets posted by local users. Local users are defined the same way as before: 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, and thus a “local user”.

Of the 13.8 million tweets in this year’s sample:

• Just under 800,000 or 5.7% were tagged #yeg.
• More than 950,000 or 6.9% were retweets.
• About 5.1 million or 37.2% were replies.
• Roughly 1.2 million or 9.1% were replies to other local users.
• Nearly 3.2 million or 23.2% contained links.
• More than 640,000 or 4.7% were twooshes (exactly 140 characters).

In 2013, the day of the week with most tweets posted was Wednesday, which is consistent with previous years. Sunday and Saturday saw the fewest tweets posted.

Local users used over 840,000 different hashtags in 2013. As usual, hashtags ranged in length from 1 character to 139, excluding the hash, and they were used for just about every purpose you can think of. The average hashtag length was 13 characters.

Here are the top 25 hashtags used by local users in 2013:

1. #yeg
2. #oilers
3. #edmonton
4. #yegfood
5. #yegvote
6. #ableg
7. #cdnpoli
8. #yyc
9. #shpk
10. #yegwx
11. #jobs
12. #yegcc
13. #nhl
14. #ff
15. #yegtraffic
16. #stalbert
17. #yegdt
18. #ualberta
19. #yegarts
20. #cbc
21. #yegweather
22. #whatshouldplaynext
23. #teamfollowback
24. #instantfollowback
25. #canada

Here’s a visualization of the top 100 hashtags excluding #yeg:

It’s no surprise that #yeg was once again the most popular hashtag, by far. Twitter even declared #yeg as the second most popular trend in Canada for the year. In total, there were 4,611 different hashtags starting with #yeg used by local users in 2013.

Here are the top 25 #yeg-related hashtags:

1. #yeg
2. #yegfood
3. #yegvote
4. #yegwx
5. #yegcc
6. #yegtraffic
7. #yegdt
8. #yegarts
9. #yegweather
10. #yegarena
11. #yegmusic
12. #yegjobs
13. #yegbike
14. #yegre
15. #yegevents
16. #yegfashion
17. #yegbiz
18. #yegfringe
19. #yegtheatre
20. #yegtransit
21. #yegfilm
22. #yegmedia
23. #yegpkn
24. #yegbeer
25. #yegsa

Here’s a visualization of the top 100 #yeg-related hashtags:

No surprise that #yegfood remained on top (after #yeg of course) and I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that in an election year, #yegvote was quite popular. Interesting to me that #yegjobs is so high, but I suppose that could be due to bots or automated tweets.

I’ll have additional data to share in my next post, which will include the most active, replied to, and retweeted users of the year.

Happy Tweeting!