In case you missed it, check out the overview post for a general look at Twitter in Edmonton in 2013. In this entry I’ll share more details on who the most active, replied to, and retweeted users of the year were. If you want to see the most followed users in Edmonton, check out Twopcharts. Taylor Hall is the first local user over 300,000 followers!

A quick reminder that the data in this post comes from a sample of roughly 13.8 million tweets posted by local users as defined in the overview post. Nearly 120,000 local users posted at least one tweet in 2013.

Here are the 25 most active local users (they tweeted more than anyone else):

1. RPrasad619
2. DaniParadis
3. KikkiPlanet
4. DavidPapp
5. canadianglen
6. Leask
7. TrevorBoller
8. YEGlifer
9. JovanHeer
10. abdihalimsalad
11. MyLegacyCoach
12. HouseofGlib
13. ChristySpratlin
14. bcbreakaway
15. markyeg
16. Moesquare
17. edmontonjournal
18. 1023nowradio
19. machinegunv
20. DJ_Orphan
21. Gloriadantuono
22. tommylutz
23. eissyrC
24. ctvedmonton
25. candyTae

There were three easily-identifed bots that would have been in the list above:

1. edmonton_rt
2. EdmontonCP
3. HOT107OD

Here are the 25 most active local users using #yeg (they tweeted using the #yeg hashtag more than anyone else):

1. ctvedmonton
2. GlobalEdmonton
3. CBCEdmonton
4. iNews880
5. 925FreshFM
6. mybirdietweets
7. edmontonjournal
8. 1049VirginYEG
9. DerrickDodgeYeg
10. metroedmonton
11. RobWilliamsCTV
12. KikkiPlanet
13. Dave_CHED
14. Edmontonsun
15. Yegfit
16. YEGFoodie
17. vineshpratap
18. EJ_Arts
19. JBH8
20. lindork
21. lite957
22. DishcrawlYEG
23. Sperounes
24. 1023nowradio
25. YEGlifer

There were four bots that tweeted enough to be in that list above:

1. edmonton_rt
2. EdmCA
3. everythingyeg
4. yegtraffic

Here are the 25 most replied to local users (other local users had lots of conversations with these users):

1. KikkiPlanet
2. EdmontonOilers
3. JasonGregor
4. nielsonTSN1260
5. YEGlifer
6. Leask
7. TrevorBoller
8. CommonSenseSoc
9. JenBanksYEG
10. eissyrC
11. Wildsau
12. DeeMented2
13. Kage_99
14. britl
15. JameyMPhoto
16. erinklassen
17. dantencer
18. lindork
19. dstaples
20. baconhound
21. Steeeveohh
22. joshclassenCTV
23. JackieDee16
24. Arbitral
25. edmontonjournal

Here are the 25 most retweeted non-individual local users:

1. edmontonjournal
2. ctvedmonton
3. globaledmonton
4. cityofedmonton
5. cbcedmonton
6. edmontonoilers
7. yegsphere
8. yegtraffic
9. localgoodyeg
10. oilersnation
11. edmoilkings
12. edmontonpolice
13. yegtweetup
14. metroedmonton
15. whereedmonton
16. edmontonsun
17. ualberta
18. 925freshfm
19. cisncountry
20. inews880
21. cfl_esks
22. 1049virginyeg
23. northlands
24. nait
25. oldstrathcona

Here are the 25 most retweeted individual local users:

1. kikkiplanet
2. dantencer
3. jasongregor
4. joshclassenctv
5. fakeoilersgm
6. paulatics
7. doniveson
8. mastermaq
9. cstpower
10. nielsonTSN1260
11. sunterryjones
12. sbarsbyweather
13. wanyegretz
14. etownmickey
15. ryanjespersen
16. britl
17. davecournoyer
18. lindork
19. trevorboller
20. dstaples
21. ebs_14
22. robin_brownlee
23. yeglifer
24. staceybrotzel
25. geneprincipe

Clearly if you tweet about the Oilers, there’s a good chance you’re going to get retweeted. I’m fascinated by the fact that a satirical account, @FakeOilersGM, is the fifth most retweeted individual. Shows you what kind of year the Oilers have had, and how engaged Edmontonians are with the Oilers.

Only the Edmonton Journal was retweeted more than 10,000 times. A total of 88 users were retweeted more than 1000 times, 1547 users were retweeted more than 100 times, and nearly 11,000 users were retweeted at least 10 times.

Tools

The ten most popular tools or clients used to tweet in 2013 accounted for 84% of all local tweets. The top 25 accounted for just less than 93% of all tweets. There’s definitely a long tail here though, as more than 3300 different clients were used.

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

Here’s a look at the breakdown:

No surprise to see BlackBerry fall down below Android, but I must admit I am a little surprised it remains so high on the list.

You can see the top users & tools from previous years here: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.

Happy Tweeting!

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!

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