I love Twitter, Edmonton, and pretty graphs. In this post, I combine all three! Welcome to the first State of the Edmonton Twittersphere, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton.

As some of you know, I’ve been working on a new side project for a couple months now called ShareEdmonton. I’ll post more details on that later, but for now all you need to know is that tracking Twitter usage in Edmonton is a big part of the project. As a result, I’ve gathered lots and lots of data over the last month, and I thought I’d dig into a little.

All of the data I am sharing in this post was collected from Twitter Search. It’s a fairly broad set of updates – anything posted by Edmontonians, or about Edmonton. The data set is incomplete (I’m sure I didn’t capture all tweets, and I improved the algorithm for the second half of the month), and is subject to certain restrictions. For instance, unless someone puts “Edmonton” or something similar (lat/long, Sherwood Park, etc) in the Location field of their profile, I have no way of reliably knowing whether or not they are a local user. That said, I feel that the data set I do have is very representative of Twitter usage in the Edmonton area. Going forward, I’ll try to keep the methodology consistent.

Enough preamble – on to the statistics! For January 2009:

# of users: 1948
# of tweets: 52697

# of local users: 851 (43.69%)
# of tweets by local users: 48091 (91.26%)

# of tweets containing #yeg: 1315 (2.50%)
# of tweets that were replies: 18837 (35.75%)
# of tweets containing links: 11033 (20.94%)
# of tweets that were retweets: 265 (0.50%)

And some other interesting statistics for the month:

• Ten most active users (most tweets first): fcedmonton, angelzilla, britl, zoocasaedmonton, mastermaq, justNICKI, Pat_Lorna, iNews880, foomanizer, bgrier
• If you ignore the three “bots”, then alainsaffel, GuitarKat, and fusedlogic also make the list.
• Those thirteen users account for just over 21% of all tweets in the data set.
• Nearly 45% of all tweets were posted between 10 AM and 4 PM.
• The number of tweets posted per day generally increased throughout the month (though this is at least partially due to improvements to my code over the month). Monday, January 26th had the most tweets posted (2592).
• Local users posted 18042 replies. Of those, 7406 (41.05%) were to other local users.
• Most aren’t frequent posters: 293 local users posted 31 times or more this month.

And finally, the top ten users in Edmonton (as of January 31st):

• By # of followers: Pat_Lorna, mastermaq, LesM, cleversimon, melanienathan, saralees, babyrumps, revtrev, MobileMommy, jenandtonica
• By # of friends: Pat_Lorna, LesM, mastermaq, saralees, babyrumps, mindfullof, revtrev, MobileMommy, halosecretarial, edmontontweetup
• By # of statuses: mastermaq, hfx_ben, angelzilla, jenandtonica, ink_slinger, justNICKI, fcedmonton, britl, twot, bgrier

In the future, I hope to look at trending topics for the month to get a better idea of just what Edmontonians were talking about. Numbers are one thing, content is quite another.

I’m surprised to see that 851 local users updated this month (all but 110 updated more than once). I would have guessed there were about that many local users in total, not active! So that’s good. It’ll be interesting to see how that number grows over the next few months.

I hope you enjoyed this quick, completely unscientific look at the Edmonton Twittersphere! If you have any suggestions on other things I could include in future posts (or potentially as an update to this one) please let me know.

See you at Edmonton Twestival on February 12th!