State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – 2010 Year in Review

Welcome to the State of the Edmonton Twittersphere: 2010 Year in Review, my look at the intersection of Twitter and Edmonton in 2010! You can see my recap of 2009 here.

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

If you compare the monthly statistics here to my monthly State of the Edmonton Twittersphere posts, you’ll notice they are slightly different. The monthly posts represent a snapshot – this post reflects the most up-to-date information I have been able to gather as of the end of 2010.


Here are the highlights for 2010:

  • There were 22,000+ local users.
  • Those users posted more than 4.9 million tweets. That works out to 9.4 per minute.
  • Of those 4,948,409 tweets:
    • 381,752 contained #yeg or one of the #yeg-related hashtags (like #yegfood) (7.7%)
    • 357,206 were retweets (7.2%)
    • 1,715,507 were replies (34.7%)
    • 668,368 were replies to other local users (13.5%)
    • 1,331,306 contained links (26.9%)
    • 191,060 were twooshes (exactly 140 characters) (3.9%)

Let’s look at users. While more than 22,000 local users were on Twitter last year, only 10,200 of them were active during the month of December (active means they posted at least one tweet). But that was up from just 5601 who were active during the month of January.

When 2010 started, local users were posting about 260,000 tweets per month. By the end of the year, that number had grown to more than 525,000 tweets per month.

This chart gives you a sense of the trends over the year. I think it is interesting that the lines for #yeg-related tweets and retweets are almost identical (red and green).

Roughly 50.8% of all tweets in 2010 were posted between the hours of 9 AM and 6 PM. Not surprisingly, the number of tweets posted between midnight and 7 AM is quite a bit lower than the number posted during the day and early evening. There seems to be an early morning (9-10 AM) and late night (9-10 PM) spike.

If we look at days of the week, we see that more tweets are posted on Tuesday and Wednesday than on any other day.

In the chart below I have plotted the number of tweets posted per day for each day of the year. The trend is clearly up, and the spikes and troughs reveal some interesting events. Election day, October 18, saw the most tweets posted at 23,234. On average, 13,558 tweets were posted each day in 2010.


Here are the top 25 most followed users:

  1. revtrev
  2. Pat_Lorna
  3. biofeed
  4. randyfritz
  5. dragonage
  6. masseffect2
  7. NHL_Oilers
  8. wearestereos
  9. DancinginLife
  10. subunit1
  11. MathieuBisson
  12. MilesSTEREOS
  13. LesM
  14. patkstereos
  15. todd_herman
  16. hccedmonton
  17. redneckmommy
  18. worldprofit
  19. DrBarryLycka
  20. mtubes
  21. paradepro
  22. TSNRyanRishaug
  23. garrymullen
  24. mastermaq
  25. DarleneV

The average local user has 120 followers. Just 420 users have more than 1000 followers.

Here are the top 25 most listed users:

  1. biofeed
  2. revtrev
  3. randyfritz
  4. NHL_Oilers
  5. masseffect2
  6. dragonage
  7. paradepro
  8. redneckmommy
  9. Pat_Lorna
  10. DaBaby
  11. DancinginLife
  12. rootnl2k
  13. gsiemens
  14. edmontonjournal
  15. TSNRyanRishaug
  16. wearestereos
  17. brentcetera
  18. NiCoLeKoScH
  19. ctvedmonton
  20. gcouros
  21. cbcedmonton
  22. mastermaq
  23. lealea
  24. CityofEdmonton
  25. britl

The average local user has been listed 5 times.

Here are the top 25 most active users:

  1. EdmontonBizcaf
  2. WCIJobs
  3. rootnl2k
  4. etownmelly
  6. Lekordable
  7. ZoomJer
  8. CommonSenseSoc
  9. trinamlee
  10. GuitarKat
  11. EdmontonCP
  12. gcouros
  13. SaySandra
  14. Jaisabella
  15. frostedbetty
  16. angelzilla
  17. PoisonLolita
  18. Edmontonsun
  19. DebraWard
  20. Cokebear17
  21. RECEdmonton
  22. Sirthinks
  23. britl
  24. Leask
  25. fraygulrock

The top 100 most active users accounted for 18.5% of all local tweets.

Here are the top 25 most active users using #yeg (and #yeg-related hashtags):

  1. yegsphere
  2. edmontonjournal
  3. EdmCa
  4. rootnl2k
  5. iNews880
  6. oilersff
  7. DebraWard
  8. Edmontonsun
  9. WeatherEdmonton
  10. ctvedmonton
  11. EdmontonBizcaf
  12. WCIJobs
  13. cbcedmonton
  14. DWsBITCH
  15. Sirthinks
  16. ZoomJer
  17. livingsanctuary
  18. mastermaq
  19. fraygulrock
  20. yegtraffic
  21. Lekordable
  22. gcouros
  23. BrentWelch
  24. frostedbetty
  25. bingofuel

The top 100 most active users using #yeg and its subtags accounted for 51.8% of all #yeg-tagged tweets.

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

  1. ZoomJer
  2. PoisonLolita
  3. britl
  4. CommonSenseSoc
  5. Wildsau
  6. angelzilla
  7. RockstarJodie
  8. SaySandra
  9. bingofuel
  10. frostedbetty
  11. GuitarKat
  12. Sirthinks
  13. confessionality
  14. KikkiPlanet
  15. akomuzikera
  16. Rainyfool
  17. JenBanksYEG
  18. DebraWard
  19. FeliciaDewar
  20. mastermaq
  21. adampatterson
  22. lonesomebilydad
  23. LauraSem
  24. Pokerclack
  25. BrentWelch

The top 100 most replied to users accounted for 32.8% of all local replies (replies from one Edmontonian to another).

And here is what I think is the most significant list, the top 25 most retweeted users (by other local users):

  1. edmontonjournal
  2. ctvedmonton
  3. mastermaq
  4. CityofEdmonton
  5. dantencer
  6. cbcedmonton
  7. bingofuel
  8. iNews880
  9. Paulatics
  10. ZoomJer
  11. NHL_Oilers
  12. britl
  13. TrafficEdmonton
  14. joshclassen
  15. BrentWelch
  16. sonic1029
  17. yegfoodbank
  18. davecournoyer
  19. SimonOstler
  20. Edmontonsun
  21. JasonGregor
  22. EdmontonHumane
  23. chrislabossiere
  24. DebraWard
  25. Sirthinks

A total of 103 users were retweeted by other local users 100 times or more. Just 18 users were retweeted by other local users 1000 times or more.


The most commonly used hashtag was #yeg. Local users used #yeg roughly 6.5 times more than the next most popular hashtag, which was #FF. Here’s a word cloud of the top 1000 hashtags, including #yeg:

And here are the top 1000 without #yeg:

The average length of a hashtag was 13.7 characters (including the #). There were hashtags that were just two characters, and hashtags that were 140 characters. Here are the top 10 hashtags:

  1. #yeg
  2. #FF
  3. #oilers
  4. #edmonton
  5. #alberta
  6. #ableg
  7. #yegfood
  8. #FollowFriday
  9. #yegvote
  10. #fb

Here are the top 10 #yeg-related hashtags:

  1. #yegfood
  2. #yegvote
  3. #yegweather
  4. #yegtraffic
  5. #yegcc
  6. #yegtransit
  7. #yegarena
  8. #yegmusic
  9. #yegarts
  10. #yegfringe


There were more than 2000 different clients used by local users to post tweets in 2010. Here are the top ten clients:

  1. web
  2. TweetDeck
  3. Twitter for iPhone
  4. ÜberTwitter
  5. Twitter for BlackBerry®
  6. Echofon
  7. twitterfeed
  8. HootSuite
  9. API
  10. Twitterrific

Text messaging was the next most popular client. Here are the top ten in graphic form (percentages are of the total number of tweets, 4.9 million):

The top ten clients accounted for 76.2% of all local tweets in 2010.

Final Thoughts

Twitter continued its impressive growth all around the world in 2010, and Edmonton was no exception. Though the number of people with Twitter accounts in Edmonton pales in comparison to the number of people with Facebook accounts, I don’t think that is necessarily the best comparison to make. You need a Facebook account to access most things on Facebook, you don’t on Twitter. Twitter reaches far beyond the 22,000+ local users with accounts.

There were lots of tweetups in 2010, but fewer and fewer focused just on Twitter. Because so many more people have joined, even non-Twitter events seem like tweetups! I thought that geolocation might play a bigger role in 2010, but it didn’t really. Just 3124 users have enabled geolocation (up from 270 in 2009). Perhaps 2011 will be the year that geotagged tweets take off? You need to enable it in your settings.

I hope you’ve found this look at the Edmonton Twittersphere in 2010 interesting and informative. Thanks for reading!

14 thoughts on “State of the Edmonton Twittersphere – 2010 Year in Review

  1. Great information, Mack. I think this is must reading for anyone interested in how Twitter is evolving and why it is important – especially within a community context. Thanks for all your work and for sharing it freely with the community.

  2. Wow, thank you for this breakdown! This report is awesome. I went to U of A for a BCom back in the early 00’s. This brought back a lot of memories. E-town is a great city. I was wondering what tools/apps you used to come up with such a detailed report?

  3. Mack: you provide a tremendous service to the city, which could only be enhanced if you also sold hot dogs everywhere you went (think about it!).

    Thanks for being THE social media and new tech ambassador for the city.

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