This is the third part in my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2012 – you can read the overview post here (and here is the hashtags & links entry for 2011). As we saw in that entry, local users posted more than 4 million tweets containing links. They also posted nearly 5 million tweets containing hashtags. Let’s take a closer look at what exactly we tweeted about in 2012.

It’s difficult to extract a lot value out of links because everything is trapped behind the t.co wrapper, but I did want to highlight the time of day that links seem to be posted. Recall that the hourly peak for tweet volume in general comes at around 9 PM, whereas for tweets containing links the peak is 11 AM.

Local users used just over 1 million different hashtags in 2012, up from nearly 600,000 in 2011. 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 14 characters.

Here are the top 25 hashtags used by local users in 2012:

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

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

The most popular hashtag of all is still #yeg by a long shot. It was used about 660,000 times by local users which works out to 13.4% of all local tweets containing hashtags. The list above also illustrates the prevalence of #yeg-related hashtags. In 2012, local users used more than 4200 of them, up from 3600 last year. Though half of them were used just once, 44 #yeg-related hashtags were used more than 1000 times each.

Here are the top 25 #yeg-related hashtags:

1. #yegfood
2. #yegwx
3. #yegarts
4. #yegtraffic
5. #yegweather
6. #yegcc
7. #yegdt
8. #yegmusic
9. #yegarena
10. #yegre
11. #yegjobs
12. #yegwxfx
13. #yegtransit
14. #yegfringe
15. #yegtheatre
16. #yegfoodag
17. #yegctvml
18. #yegfilm
19. #yegbike
20. #yegfashion
21. #yegmedia
22. #yegbeer
23. #yegpets
24. #yeggeek
25. #yegwine

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

I noticed some trends looking at the top 100 hashtags, so I decided to group some tags into topics or categories. I came up with nine that stood out:

• Arts – #yegarts, #yegfringe, #yegmusic, #yegtheatre, #yegfilm
• Downtown – #yegdt, #yegarena
• Education – #abed, #edtech, #ualberta, #epsb
• Food – #yegfood, #yegfoodag
• Politics – #yegcc, #ableg, #cdnpoli, #abpoli, #yegfed
• Regions – #shpk, #sprucegrove, #stalbert, #fortsask, #strathco, #leduc
• Sports –#oilers, #nhl, #esks, #cfl, #oilkings
• Transportation – #yegtraffic, #yegtransit, #yegbike
• Weather – #yegweather, #yegwx, #yegwxfx

Here’s a breakdown of how those categories relate to one another. You can see that we tweet more about politics and sports than arts and education:

Here’s a look at the frequency of each category over the course of the year. This starts to show some interesting variations over the year, most notably in the summer when we experience our nicest weather and the Fringe Festival is taking place:

And here’s that same frequency but highlighting the spikes that took place throughout the year:

I’d love to hear your ideas for what those spikes represent, but here are my guesses for a few of them:

• Sports – April 10, 2012 – This was the day the Oilers won the lottery for the first overall draft pick.
• Education – June 15, 2012 – This was the day of the HUB Mall shooting.
• Sports – June 22, 2012 – This was the day the Oilers selected Nail Yakupov first overall at the 2012 NHL Entry Draft.
• Arts – August 17, 2012 – This was the day after the Fringe started and was the day of the Metallica concert.
• Downtown – October 17, 2012 – This was the day of the Downtown Arena update (Mandel’s deadline for the Katz Group).
• Food – October 26, 2012 – This was the day of the public hearing on the Food & Agriculture Strategy.
• Transportation/Weather – November 7, 2012 – This was the day of our first major snowfall.
• Politics – December 12, 2012 – This was the day Council voted to re-open negotiations with the Katz Group on the arena.

You might be wondering about the provincial election that took place in April. Well I originally included #abvote in the Politics category, but it skewed the results so dramatically I took it out. Here’s what it the year looks like if you include #abvote:

April 23 was election day, and local users posted more tweets on that day than any other until the snowstorm came along and on November 6 and 7. In addition to those two days, just one other day in 2012 had more tweets than election day and that was December 12 when Council last discussed the arena.

This entry brings my 2012 report to a close. I hope you found it useful – thanks for reading!

2012 in Review

1. Overview
2. Users & Clients
3. Hashtags & Links

This is the second part in my State of the Edmonton Twittersphere for 2012 – you can read the overview post here (and here is the users & clients post for 2011). As we saw in that entry, more than 105,000 local users posted at least one tweet in 2012. Let’s take a closer look at users and the tools they used to post tweets.

While a large number of users posted at least one tweet throughout the year, there are fewer users who post something in any given month. Keeping in mind that November is underrepresented in this chart, we can see that October had the most active users at nearly 52,000, and the trend is very clearly going up.

Again I think it is really interesting to look at this data over the longer term. Here’s a look at the growth in monthly active users since I started tracking data in 2009:

There are a small number of really active users, and a much larger number of less active users. In 2012, the top 100 most active users accounted for about 1.5 million or 8.8% of all local tweets (that’s down from 16% in 2011).

Here are the 25 most active users:

1. MadMissee
2. KikkiPlanet
3. theleanover
4. rootnl2k
5. JameyMPhoto
6. JovanHeer
7. markyeg
8. TrevorBoller
9. Klayoven
10. CommonSenseSoc
11. prabhjots5
12. Leask
13. canadianglen
14. edmontonjournal
15. Walleedj
16. PetitMonstre77
17. alannafletcher
18. AskMartyMisner
19. ZoomJer
20. MandaTRT
21. jmschow
22. DerrickDodgeYeg
23. Pokerclack
24. YEGlifer
25. scottyos

Here are the 5 most active bots or automated feeds:

1. EdmontonBizcaf
2. GCAccess
3. yegtraffic
4. EdmCa
5. yegwx

Combined, the top 30 users accounted for about 4.6% of all local tweets (down from 8.3% last year).

Here are the 25 most active users using #yeg:

1. ctvedmonton
2. DerrickDodgeYeg
3. CBCEdmonton
4. iNews880
5. metroedmonton
6. Edmontonsun
7. edmontonjournal
8. JBH8
9. 1049VirginYEG
10. RobWilliamsCTV
11. GlobalEdmonton
12. JOEFM
13. lindork
14. MaddCashFS
15. 1023nowradio
16. BTEdmonton
17. OFSS1969
18. SpontainRichFS
19. TrevorBoller
20. oldstrathcona
21. KikkiPlanet
22. EJ_Arts
23. DebraWard
24. artrubicon
25. CommonSenseSoc

Here are the 5 most active bots or automated feeds using #yeg:

1. EdmCa
2. yegwx
3. yegsphere
4. yegtraffic
5. hiresuccessjobs

The top 100 most active users using #yeg and related tags accounted for 1.4% of all local tweets, and 25.8% of all #yeg-tagged tweets, down from 30.3% last year.

Here are the 25 most replied to users (by other local users):

1. KikkiPlanet
2. JenBanksYEG
3. JasonGregor
4. nielson1260
5. JameyMPhoto
6. ZoomJer
7. TrevorBoller
8. Leask
9. CommonSenseSoc
10. britl
11. YEGlifer
12. Pokerclack
13. Wildsau
14. EdmontonOilers
15. baconhound
16. Luzzara
17. BigAddie
18. theleanover
19. dantencer
20. CopperTopper_85
21. dstaples
22. bananaramafoFin
23. lindork
24. Kristinnuendo
25. amvanimere

Those 25 users accounted for 8.3% of all local replies, down from 11.2% last year. The top 100 most replied to local users accounted for 2.7% of all local tweets and 18.7% of all local replies (compared to 24.5% last year).

I think the retweet is one of the most valuable metrics on Twitter. Anyone can post a lot, or gain a lot of followers, but to get retweeted by lots of other people you need to be useful/interesting/funny/inspiring/etc. In the past I have just produced one list of the most retweeted users, but this year I decided to separate individuals from organizations.

Here are the 25 most retweeted non-individual users:

1. edmontonjournal
2. ctvedmonton
3. EdmontonOilers
4. metroedmonton
5. CBCEdmonton
6. GlobalEdmonton
7. yegtraffic
8. CityofEdmonton
9. EdmOilKings
10. Edmontonsun
11. edmontonpolice
12. HopeMission
13. UAlberta
14. EdmontonHumane
15. iNews880
16. CISNCountry
17. AvenueEdmonton
18. cfl_esks
19. EJ_Extra
20. oldstrathcona
21. BlitzEdmonton
22. TBSonK97
23. sonic1029
24. DerrickDodgeYeg
25. FlyEIA

Here are the 25 most retweeted individual users:

1. KikkiPlanet
2. Paulatics
3. mastermaq
4. dantencer
5. JasonGregor
6. hallsy04
7. joshclassenCTV
8. CstPower
9. ryanjespersen
10. dstaples
11. britl
12. davecournoyer
13. TrevorBoller
14. lindork
15. VassyKapelos
16. sunterryjones
17. ebs_14
18. SBarsbyweather
19. ChrisTse_
20. nielson1260
21. Wildsau
22. GenePrincipe
23. JameyMPhoto
24. etownmickey
25. bingofuel

A total of 59 users were retweeted by other local users 1000 times or more. Just 7 users were retweeted more than 5000 times, and @KikkiPlanet was the only individual in that group. Just like last year, only @EdmontonJournal was retweeted more than 10,000 times.

I did not keep track of the most followed users this year, primarily because the information is readily available elsewhere. If you want to know who the most followed users in Edmonton are, check out Twopcharts.

Clients

More than 3800 different applications and services were used to post tweets in 2012, up slightly from more than 3100 last year. For the first time since I have been tracking stats, the web is no longer the top dog! Here are the top ten:

1. Twitter for iPhone
2. web
3. Twitter for BlackBerry®
4. Twitter for Android
5. TweetDeck
6. HootSuite
7. Instagram
8. Facebook
9. Tweet Button
10. Echofon

The top ten clients accounted for 82.9% of all local tweets posted in 2012 (compared to 76.8% last year).

Coming Up

1. Overview
2. Users & Clients
3. Hashtags & Links

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

I’ve done my best to ensure all of the data in this report is accurate, but I make no guarantees – use it at your own risk. The data comes from the Twitter API, and was collected over the course of 2012. 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”.

Please treat the numbers in this report as a minimum. There are instances where I wasn’t able to capture all of the data, and there are certainly users here in Edmonton who do not match the above definition of a “local user”. More important than the raw numbers themselves are the trends, and that’s why in many cases I have presented rounded rather than exact figures. You can click on any graph to see a larger version.

Here are the highlights for 2012:

• More than 105,000 local users posted at least one tweet.
• About 17 million tweets were posted by local users, which works out to 32.3 tweets per minute (up from 11.2 million tweets and 21.4 tweets per minute last year).
• Here’s a breakdown of those tweets:
  • Nearly 900,000 tweets were tagged #yeg or a related hashtag (5.3%, down from 6.4% last year)
  • More than 850,000 tweets were retweets (5.1%, down from 6.2% last year)
  • About 6.5 million tweets were replies (38.8%, down from 39.4% last year)
  • Just under 2.4 million tweets were replies to other local users (14.2%, down from 15.2% last year)
  • About 4 million tweets contained links (23.3%, down from 22.9% last year)
  • Nearly 5 million tweets contained hashtags (28.9%)
  • More than 400,000 tweets were twooshes (a twoosh is exactly 140 characters) (2.5%, down from 2.9% last year)

When the year started, Edmontonians were posting about 1.2 million tweets per month. While the growth over the course of the year was less dramatic than in years past, the trend was clearly up. Please note that November shows a dip but that was due to issues with my system, and does not reflect a sudden drop in activity. October was the busiest month we’ve had in terms of tweet volume, with a little over 1.7 million tweets posted.

The day with the most tweets posted was November 7. A quick scan of the headlines shows that was the day of our major snowfall that caused all kinds of issues for Edmontonians, and clearly they took to Twitter to talk about it. A little over 50 tweets per minute were posted that day, and the number of local replies to one another was twice the average.

Roughly 47.5% of all local tweets were posted between the hours of 9 AM and 6 PM, which is down a little from 49.1% last year. The fewest tweets are posted around 4 AM, and the peak comes at around 9 PM.

Looking at days of the week, it turns out that Wednesday had the most tweets posted followed closely by Tuesday, with Monday being having the fewest. This is more or less the same as last year, when Wednesday was also the highest and Sunday was the lowest.

Looking at the stats by year is great, but it is the longer-term view that is most interesting. Here’s a look at the number of tweets posted per month since I started tracking back at the beginning of 2009:

When I built my tracking system at the end of 2008 there were very few users and very few tweets being posted each month. I have maintained and improved it over the last few years, and thankfully Twitter’s API has become incredibly stable. But the original design/approach has reached some limits. So with that in mind, I built a new system over the holidays that I will soon be launching at ShareEdmonton so that you can see this information in near real-time. It may not be as complete initially, but I will improve it over the course of the year. Stay tuned!

Coming Up

In order to make it easier to produce and consume this report, I have decided to break it into sections. This entry provided an overview, and upcoming entries will focus on different aspects of Twitter usage in Edmonton:

1. Overview
2. Users & Clients
3. Hashtags & Links

If you have any questions about this information, please leave a comment below!