Social Media Column: The State of Edmonton’s Twittersphere

Published in the January 15, 2013 issue of The Edmonton Sun.

Linda’s social media column can be found every Tuesday in the Edmonton Sun.

The State of Edmonton’s Twittersphere

Last year there were 17 million tweets posted on Twitter from users in the Edmonton area.

October was the busiest month for local tweets, with just over 1.7 million posts made that month alone, and Wednesdays appeared to be the most popular day to tweet.

This is just a sample of statistics taken from a report posted last week by local blogger and early Twitter adopter Mack Male (@mastermaq).

The 29-year-old software developer and ‘social media guy’ has been putting out ‘State of the Edmonton Twittersphere’ reports since 2009.

Male created his own software to pull in and analyze data from Twitter and many, including myself, have come to look forward to the annual reports.

“The response has been very positive,” Male says. “It was really interesting over the last few days how many people were like, ‘Man I just got a ton of followers’ and they think it’s because they were on the list.”

Male’s reports are not only fun for individual tweeters eager to see if they’ve made the list of most active, retweeted or replied-to users, but it also acts as a great resource for organizations or businesses looking for very local numbers to make a credible case that this Twitter thing is a pretty big deal.

“Organizations use the report to sort of justify why they have a Twitter or why they use Twitter which I think is pretty interesting,” Male says. “They finally have numbers to point to, to show this is how many users use it.”

One of the most interesting points from this year’s report – for Male and for myself – is that it appears more of the average Edmontonian is using the social network.

“The percentage of tweets from people in Edmonton posted that had the #yeg hashtag actually went down and to me that’s sort of a reflection that there’s probably more average people, not the super geeky, early adopters, using the service.”

Another interesting point is when compared to Calgary, Edmonton appears to have a higher number of tweets categorized under “local replies,” which means more people in our community are talking to one another and engaging in conversations.

As you can imagine, producing the reports takes a lot of time and work but it’s all worth it for Male.

“It just satisfies my own curiosity number one, I really love to find all the data, the answers out, so that’s interesting,” he said.

And most importantly?

“It’s fun more than anything,” he said.

Fun for him, fun for me, and fun for everyone curious about how locals are using Twitter.

You can check out all the 2012 stats by heading to http://blog.mastermaq.ca/

And you can expect more stats to come, as Mack’s developing a new system to gather data and expects to put out more real-time figures in the near future.

I’m looking forward to it!

Click here to read the column on the Edmonton Sun website!

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