12 Best Twitter Cities in the World?
I saw a link come through my twitter feed today that mentioned the cities with the most Twitter users and I was a little amazed that Austin Texas was even on the list let alone in the top twenty; after all Austin is only 1.7 million strong in the metro area, which is much smaller than all the cities in the top 20. I immediately got to thinking that we must have a bigger Twitter per capita than the other cities. Since its my job to have a handle on this kind of data I went to work.
I grabbed data for the top 12 cities with the most Twitter users and then ran the numbers:
And the winner is, Austin Texas!
I’m not a statistician by any means. I pulled my numbers from wikipedia and grader.com.
*update // population refers to roughly the ‘metro area’ of a given city.
Hi. Someone retweeted this and I checked your numbers against wikipedia and your numbers for London, New York City and Los Angeles population are gratuitously wrong.
Were on wikipedia did you get the pop numbers for these?
New York City has 8,363,710 in population alone.
I'm interested in seeing your revision nonetheless.
Erick
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@erick // yeah. numbers aren't going to be perfect. Wiki entries had a stat for 'metro' and some had 'urban'
i tried to go with metro area since on twitter people tend to put the major city they live near. One may live in an outlying town of San Diego but put San Diego as their city
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Erick Bauman Reply:
April 19th, 2010 at 5:13 pm
Sorry, that sampling of "metro" is not pertaining to actual city location. In areas such as NYC, la, London it's a grouping of economic calculations. So no, city proper is the sampling that should be used for a study like this. Because even in the case of Austin, round rock is included. If you take Austin proper at 770,ooo+ versus the 1.7 you quoted and compute against the other cities it changes the data substantially. Also, based upon your logic if someone says they live there but are in the town over, you need at least on hard data point like city proper versus economic metropolitan, which in NYC includes some of Jersey.
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Vince Reply:
April 19th, 2010 at 5:18 pm
which is why i would never claim to be a statistician. This is totally un-scientific. Considering the twitter user number is based on people putting that city in for their location.
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Erick Bauman Reply:
April 19th, 2010 at 5:28 pm
Wow. Sorry I ruined your fun on a Monday night and for having the acumen to challenge your results. I should be more like everyone else and just take what's written on the "internets" as truth. All the best. Thanks for taking the time to do this and provoke conversation. Erick
Vince Reply:
April 19th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
much love man. thanks for chiming in.
Erick Bauman Reply:
April 19th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
Also, after taking a further look the rankings might not shift that much. Austin still remains fairly high in the list. Regardless, this is a great thing for interesting conversation. Thanks for taking this time.best- erick
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Vince Reply:
April 19th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
true, given spot on data i wouldn't expect the list to shift to dramatically.
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What is interesting for as much media play that twitter gets, how small the percentages are that are actually using it. Also, I'll bet that an even small percentage and "very engaged" with twitter.
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Vince Reply:
June 1st, 2010 at 4:46 am
Right. Amazing how such a small number of people can generate som much noise.
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Twitter use in Austin http://bit.ly/ahFM7Y (cc: @oscardavila)
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