State of the Victoria Twittersphere – March 2010

Welcome to the third State of the Victoria Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Victoria, BC. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For March 2010:

# of local users: 2466 (an increase of 707 over February)
# of tweets by local users: 81649
# of tweets by local users containing #yyj: 7476 (9.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 23855 (29.2%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 27881 (34.1%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 6301 (7.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 3042 (3.7%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

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

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just under 56% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 1.8 tweets per minute in March (compared with 1.5 tweets per minute in February).
The day with the most local tweets posted was March 4 at 4438. On average, 2634 local tweets were posted each day (compared with 2150 in February).
Of the 23855 replies posted by local users this month, 7043 or 29.5% were to other local users.
A total of 388 users posted 50 times or more in March. In comparison, 227 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users:

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

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Final Thoughts

First off, apologies for the late stats this month. I think the increased numbers in March reflect three more days in the month than we had in February, but also some steady growth (and perhaps some modifications I made to my code). I’m still impressed by the relatively high percentage (relative to other cities) of tagged tweets in Victoria!

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – March 2010

Welcome to the third State of the Edmonton Twittersphere of 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton, AB. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For March 2010:

# of local users: 8095 (an increase of 1624 from February)
# of tweets by local users: 416919
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 27538 (6.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 144491 (34.7%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 105599 (25.3%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 20345 (4.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 14367 (3.4%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

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

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just over 52% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 9.3 tweets per minute in March (compared to 8.3 tweets per minute in February).
The day with the most local tweets posted was March 26 at 15986. On average, 13449 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 11933 in February).
Of the 144491 replies posted by local users this month, 47407 or 32.8% were to other local users.
A total of 1573 users posted 50 times or more in March. In comparison, 1296 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users:

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

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Final Thoughts

First off, apologies for the late stats this month. I think the increased numbers in March reflect three more days in the month than we had in February, but also some steady growth (and perhaps some modifications I made to my code). More than 10,000 tweets were posted each day in March.

Twitter, Embargoes, and Breaking News

At the end of March, Global Edmonton’s Lynda Steele, one of our city’s most prominent media Twitterers, abruptly said goodbye and deleted her account. She suggested that Global was consolidating accounts, which understandably raised the ire of many local users (for more check out Adam’s post). Last week, a different truth emerged, thanks to a tweet from CBC’s John Archer. He posted this PDF (archive) of a letter sent from the provincial government’s Public Affairs Bureau to Global Edmonton (it has been clicked more than 550 times). In it, PAB Managing Director Lee Funke informs Global Edmonton that for breaking the budget embargo, they would be denied access to any embargoed information until the end of 2010. Lynda was the one who broke the embargo, by posting tweets before the 3:20 PM budget address, so that’s likely why she left Twitter (though there may be other reasons too).

Much has already been written about whether or not the decision is warranted, and even whether or not we need embargoes in this day and age. For more, check out Dave’s post. As someone who continually pushes for open, accessible information, I think you can guess where I stand. And with that in mind, and in addition to the PDF letter above, here are some of the facts.

The four tweets that started all of this, written by @lyndasteele:

BREAKING BUDGET NEWS – Another record deficit, more money for health care and hope for recession recovery. #yeg #ableg [2/9/2010 3:16:44 PM]

The budget deficit for the coming year is projected to be 4.7 billion, almost double what was projected in last year’s budget forecast. [2/9/2010 3:17:08 PM]

Most of the new spending is going to health. 1.7 billion dollars more this year, [2/9/2010 3:17:20 PM]

Edmonton will receive about 100 million dollars less fr province – for Calgary the shortfall could be 150 million. #ableg [2/9/2010 3:17:53 PM]

And then, for whatever reason, she didn’t tweet again until 5:17:01 PM to plug Hugh MacDonald talking about the budget on the Early News.

Her final tweet:

Hey all – Global consolidating twitter…for all your daily news – check out @globaledmonton – take care – it was nice to know ya! [3/31/2010 1:37:41 PM]

It didn’t take long after that was posted for the conversation to get underway. Dozens and dozens of tweets were posted defending Lynda, and asking for more information on the decision. Of course, only a handful of people knew what was really going on, and none of that made it onto Twitter until the letter was posted.

Global Edmonton itself followed up with a tweet a couple of hours later at 3:58 PM:

GM Tim Spelliscy corrects bad scoop. GE is NOT consolidating accounts, not now or ever. Our personalities will continue to Twitter. [3/31/2010 3:58:38 PM]

Shortly afterward, there was a @fakeLyndaSteele account and the conversation continued for a day or two.

Will this affect social media use by the media?

There’s not much to say about the embargo, is there? There were clearly defined rules broken, and as a result Global Edmonton faced consequences. I think you could make a strong case against having embargoes in the first place, but that isn’t going to change what has already happened.

I do think it’s unfortunate that Lynda Steele is no longer on Twitter because of all of this. Not that I thought she was the best or most trustworthy user, but she was a highly visible member of the media experimenting and pushing the boundaries. I hope that this debacle doesn’t turn other members of the media off from exploring further social media use. Instead, I hope this can be used as a case study to learn from.

How much traffic do the Edmonton Journal and iNews880 get from Twitter?

Depending on who you talk to, Twitter is either killing news media or saving it. A recent analysis by Hitwise found that less than 0.2% of people who use Twitter wind up going to news and media sites (thanks to Karen for the link). Their analysis looks at Twitter as a whole though, and I’m not sure how well it accounts for local news sites. I believe very strongly that social media has the greatest impact at the local level (more on this in a future post). Given that, I have long wondered how Twitter has impacted local news media here in Edmonton. Last night, I finally did some analysis. I decided to explore how much traffic the Edmonton Journal and iNews880, Edmonton’s two top tweeting media outlets, received from Twitter last year.

@EdmontonJournal

First up, the Edmonton Journal. They’ve been tweeting news articles since at least January 2009, so I had lots of data to play with. They used tweetburner to shorten links until September when they switched to bit.ly. Using the APIs available from those services, I added up all the click stats for all the links posted by The Journal. Here’s what I found:

Lots of variation, as you can see. Some of that is down to the use of two services, some of it is because of the number of Twitter users. There are probably dozens of other factors too.

For the period January 30 through December 31:

A total of 153,968 clicks were recorded on 4737 links.
That’s an average of 33 clicks per link, and an average of 15 links per day.
According to the stats on the bit.ly links, 95.4% of clicks come from the Edmonton Journal’s hash*.
The link with the most clicks (700) was this one, on May 26. It doesn’t work, because annoyingly The Journal doesn’t display old articles for some reason, but it appears it was about Edmonton’s Poet Laureate Roland Pemberton.
The day with the most clicks, September 14, doesn’t appear to be special…just lots of clicks that day for some reason (any ideas?).

@iNews880

Next up, iNews880, one of the first local media organizations to join Twitter. They used tinyurl.com until July, when Twitter switched the default to bit.ly, so unfortunately I only have data for the latter half of the year:

For the period July 14 through December 31:

A total of 90,500 clicks were recorded on 3811 links.
That’s an average of 24 clicks per link, and an average of 22 links per day.
According to the stats on the bit.ly links, 93.8% of clicks come from iNews880’s hash*.
The link with the most clicks (1933) was this one, on August 2 (that’s the huge spike in the graph above). The link goes to the report on the Big Valley Jamboree stage collapse, and it was popular because it included before and after photos.

Edmonton Journal vs. iNews880

I wanted to do a quick comparison, so I chose the period September 17 through December 31, because both sites used bit.ly for links during that time. Here’s what it looks like:

During that time:

The Edmonton Journal posted 2369 links (23 per day) and iNews880 posted 2261 links (22 per day).
A total of 79,519 clicks were recorded on Edmonton Journal links (an average of 751 per day or 34 per link).
A total of 53,815 clicks were recorded on iNews880 links (an average of 508 per day or 24 per link).

Thoughts

That’s a lot of clicks! Clearly Twitter and other social networking sites (where most shortlinks are posted) are having an impact. But how much? According to the latest report by the Newspaper Audience Databank (NADbank), weekly online readership at EdmontonJournal.com increased by 35% last year to 115,900 from 85,800 in 2008. That’s an increase of 30,100 readers per week. According to the click stats above, The Journal received 3208 clicks per week in 2009. So what does that mean?

Roughly 10.7% of the Edmonton Journal’s online readership increase in 2009 came as a result of posting links to Twitter.

And if I had to guess, I’d say my analysis probably underestimates things. Apparently the NADbank data is based on surveys, so I’m not sure how accurate it is, but it’s probably within acceptable margins of error. I’m also not sure what exactly a “reader” is – a page view, a visit, etc.

Caveats

I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible, but I can’t make any guarantees!

All the click stats are current as of last night.
I’m suggesting that all the clicks come via Twitter, when that’s probably not entirely true. Links get passed around, displayed on websites, etc. But the shortlinks do originate at Twitter.
It’s possible that The Journal or iNews880 posted a link to somewhere other than their own sites, but uncommon. I did remove one link from the iNews880 dataset, because it pointed to an Environment Canada site (it was obvious, lots of total clicks as others have linked there too). For the rest, I’m making the assumption that the links point to the news sites.
I don’t know how reliable the stats from bit.ly and tweetburner are. I suspect they are quite a bit different than server logs or Google Analytics metrics.
I would assume that both services tweaked the way stats are calculated throughout the year, so 15 clicks on a bit.ly link in May is probably different than 15 clicks on a bit.ly link in December.

* – When you shorten a link using bit.ly, you get a unique hash. If I shorten the same link, I get a different hash. The stats are recorded and made available individually and in aggregate, however.

State of the Ottawa Twittersphere – February 2010

Welcome to the second State of the Ottawa Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Ottawa, ON. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For February 2010:

# of local users: 9366 (an increase of 804 from January)
# of tweets by local users: 452190
# of tweets by local users containing #ottawa/#yow: 2719 (0.6%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 161654 (35.7%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 109478 (24.2%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 25947 (5.7%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 13205 (2.9%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

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

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just under 50% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 11.2 tweets per minute in February (compared to 9.6 tweets per minute in January).
The day with the most local tweets posted was February 28 at 23063. On average, 16150 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 13750 in January).
Of the 161654 replies posted by local users this month, 45323 or 28.0% were to other local users.
A total of 1732 users posted 50 times or more in January. In comparison, 1461 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users:

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Final Thoughts

As with the other Canadian cities, the busiest day in February in Ottawa was the 28th due to the gold medal hockey game. The second busiest was the 12th, the day of the opening ceremonies for the Olympics. The growth in the Ottawa twittersphere this month is similar to that of Calgary. Still a severe lack of tagged tweets though!

State of the Calgary Twittersphere – February 2010

Welcome to the second State of the Calgary Twittersphere of 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Calgary, AB. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For February 2010:

# of local users: 8190 (an increase of 819 from January)
# of tweets by local users: 390224
# of tweets by local users containing #yyc: 11486 (2.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 116346 (29.8%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 112937 (28.9%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 20679 (5.3%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 13422 (3.4%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

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

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just under 48% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 9.7 tweets per minute in February (compared to 7.9 tweets per minute in January).
The day with the most local tweets posted was February 28 at 21292. On average, 13937 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 11334 in January).
Of the 116346 replies posted by local users this month, 31507 or 27.1% were to other local users.
A total of 1434 users posted 50 times or more in January. In comparison, 1319 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users:

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

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Final Thoughts

As with Edmonton and Victoria, the busiest day of the month was February 28 at 21292 tweets thanks to the gold medal hockey game. Calgary actually broke the 20000 mark twice this month – the other day was February 12, the day the opening ceremonies took place. It was a pretty impressive month for stats, especially given that it was three days shorter than normal!

State of the Victoria Twittersphere – February 2010

Welcome to the second State of the Victoria Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Victoria, BC. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For February 2010:

# of local users: 1759 (an increase of 513 over January)
# of tweets by local users: 60185
# of tweets by local users containing #yyj: 6493 (10.8%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 17277 (28.7%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 19753 (32.8%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 5013 (8.3%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 2339 (3.9%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

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

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just over 52% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 1.5 tweets per minute in February (compared with 1.1 tweets per minute in January).
The day with the most local tweets posted was February 28 at 3408. On average, 2150 local tweets were posted each day (compared with 1575 in January).
Of the 17277 replies posted by local users this month, 5385 or 31.2% were to other local users.
A total of 270 users posted 50 times or more in February. In comparison, 107 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users:

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

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Final Thoughts

A nice increase in numbers over January! Like Edmonton, the busiest day of the month was February 28, when Canada won Olympic gold in the mens hockey game. We’ll have to see if the bump carries over into March.

State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – February 2010

Welcome to the second State of the Edmonton Twittersphere of 2010, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton, AB. You can see last month’s stats here.

For information on the data, definitions, and other background, click here.

For February 2010:

# of local users: 6471 (an increase of 630 from January)
# of tweets by local users: 334127
# of tweets by local users containing #yeg: 20438 (6.1%)
# of tweets by local users that were replies: 117188 (35.1%)
# of tweets by local users containing links: 73834 (22.1%)
# of tweets by local users that were retweets: 16658 (5.0%)
# of tweets by local users that were twooshes: 12397 (3.7%)

Here are the numbers above in graphic form:

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

Some other interesting stats for the month:

Just under 51% of all local tweets were posted between 9 AM and 5 PM.
Local users posted roughly 8.3 tweets per minute in February (compared to 7.4 tweets per minute in January).
The day with the most local tweets posted was February 28 at 19372. On average, 11933 local tweets were posted each day (compared to 10588 in January).
Of the 117188 replies posted by local users this month, 37648 or 32.1% were to other local users.
A total of 1256 users posted 50 times or more in January. In comparison, 970 users posted just once.

Here are the top ten most followed local users:

Here are the top ten most listed local users:

Here are the top ten most active local users:

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

Here are the top ten most replied to local users:

Final Thoughts

A relatively big increase in the number of active users this month! I’m not 100% sure what the cause was, but I suspect it was the Olympics. The two busiest days this month were February 12 with 17281 tweets posted and February 28 with 19372 tweets posted – the opening ceremonies, and the hockey game & closing ceremonies, respectively. I’m planning to analyze those tweets further (when I have some time).

More stats on the way soon!

GalaGuru 2010 & Edmonton Twestival

Guru Digital Arts College, a digital media school located in downtown Edmonton, is hosting an event on March 25 at Latitude 53 called GalaGuru to celebrate the co-mingling of the creative arts and technology. This is the second year they’ve held the event, which features local food, interactive exhibits, and Edmonton’s own The Be Arthurs!

Also on March 25, is Twestival Global 2010. Hundreds of cities around the world, including Edmonton, will be hosting local events to create awareness for the important cause of education. All funds raised will go to Concern Worldwide, an organization that provides education for the world’s poorest children. Founded in 1968, Concern’s current education programs reach over 700,000 people in 25 countries. Twestival is also a fun way to meet other local Twitter users face-to-face!

So we’ve got a local educational institution hosting a big party on the same day that Twitter users are rallying around education. Sounds like a great match! That’s why were joining forces:

WHO: You and all your friends!
WHAT: GalaGuru 2010 & Edmonton Twestival (on ShareEdmonton)
WHEN: March 25, 2010 at 6 PM
WHERE: Latitude 53 – 10248 106 Street
WHY: To celebrate creative arts, technology, and education!

If you’re planning to attend, please RSVP and if you’re on Twitter, add your name to the wiki. You can donate to Concern online (use the widget on the right here), or bring your donation with you to the event. Hope to see you there!

Edmonton Tweets during the Men’s Gold Medal Hockey Game

I’m sure you’ve seen by now the chart that EPCOR released showing water consumption in Edmonton during the men’s gold medal hockey game on February 28th. It’s pretty amazing how closely the data matches the end of the periods! I’m sure the game had an impact on many other parts of our lives as well. For instance, tweeting!

Here’s how much Edmontonians were tweeting during the game:

I’ve also stuck February 21 and March 7 in there, so you can see the difference from normal. We posted 27 tweets per minute from noon until 6pm on game day. That’s about three times more than normal!

Here’s what we were tweeting about:

No surprise there! I’ll have more Twitter stats up soon.

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