Swedish internet use 2013
.SE (Stiftelsen för Internetinfrastruktur) has released their report for 2013 (in Swedish) about Swedish Internet usage. The report follows various aspects of internet use and follows their development over the years.
sweden
How many Twitter users in Sweden 2013?
Almost half a million Swedish Twitter accounts is the quick answer. Twitter in Sweden has seen an strong period of growth during the past year.
Hampus Brynolf and Intellecta Corporate have released the results of their third Swedish Twitter census.
The number of Twitter accounts that at some point during a 30 day period in February/March 2013 tweeted in Swedish was 475,474. This is an increase of 59% in the 10-11 months since Intellecta presented the 2012 results.
For each potential Swede found, the words from their latest 100 tweets are analised. If enough words are Swedish, then they are classed as Swedish and their follows/followers analyised.
Healthy growth
In April last year there were 290,000 Swedish accounts. The first Swedish Twittercensus In December 2010 found just over 90,000 accounts. This year’s growth rate of 59% is tiny in comparison to the growth by approximately 300% during 2011.
Not all of the 460,000 accounts are active. Quite the opposite. Around half of these accounts haven’t written a single Tweet during the month that was analysed.
A number of those accounts, although not actively writing, will be actively reading – but this is impossible to calculate.
This total also excludes protected accounts as it’s not possible to analyse the language of their private tweets.
Very active Swedes
The number of very active Swedes – where one or more tweet is written (on average) during the 30 day period – also rose. Up from 52,887 to 79,516. A rise of around 50%.
It would be interesting to see how many of those 50,000 who were tweeting daily in 2012 were still tweeting daily in 2013. Many of them will be, but far from all.
The number of active Swedes – that is those who wrote a tweet during the 30 days of the census – was 219,732.
Diversity
Twitter is no longer a niche network occupied by early adopters. It is now broadly established in Sweden. Analysis of the bios associated with the accounts shows a rich diversity of occupations, people, and interests on Twitter.
A fascinating fact thrown out by Hampus during the presentation was that the number of degrees of separation between Swedish Twitter users was usually 2 (sometimes 3).
Although everyone is relatively close on Twitter, the clusters found were very strong and certain clusters were very separated from others. There isn’t one Twitter, there are many.
An interactive visualisation of all the Swedish Twitter accounts found and their clustering according to analysis of their bio can be found here.
An established platform
The previous Twitter census was performed directly after a significant peak in number of new registrations. It was always going to be very difficult for the growth levels this year to match last year.
That said, with there being a Twitter account for every 1 in 20 Swedes and the rich diversity of people present on the platform, Twitter has established itself quite definitely In Sweden as a communication, broadcast and social platform.
Or perhaps, because of the clustering, we should say that it’s one platform but multiple channels. That’s tactically important for businesses to remember…
How many Twitter users in Sweden in 2013? beant.in/YhMx5m #twittercensus
Swedish internet usage 2012
It’s autumn, and .SE (Stiftelsen för Internetinfrastruktur) has released their yearly report (in Swedish) about Swedish internet use. It’s a wide-ranging report covering many aspects of internet use.
How many Twitter users in Sweden 2012?
In February 2011 Intellecta Corporate published the results of their first Twitter Census.
Hampus Brynolf and Intellecta have today presented the results of their second Twitter Census. There are almost 300,000 Swedish Twitter accounts.
Comparable method
The same method as the first Twitter census has been used to decide if a Twitter account is Swedish or not. Details of the method can be found in last year’s blog post. Using the same method means that we can directly compare the figures from last year with those from this.
In December 2010 there were 91316 Swedish Twitter accounts as reported in the first Twitter census. As of April 2011 there were 299000. Basically three times as many in just over a year.
Svenska Twitter
In December 2011 Aitellu presented the results of their Twitter research. Which they have recently updated. Their method for counting Swedish accounts differs to that of Intellecta’s, so the two figures are not directly comparable. That said, in January 2011 Aitellu counted 146995 Swedish Twitter accounts. In May 2012 they announced that the figure had risen to 318651.That’s roughly double as many in half a year.
Both sets of research clearly show that Twitter is growing faster than ever. What Hampus also revealed today was how the reach of Twitter had broadened dramatically. In the original Twitter census, the word “journalist” was the most common word in bio texts on profiles. Now words such as “student” and “musik” have taken the lead as most frequently used.
171000 Active Swedes
Just as last time, the survey calculated the number of active Swedish Twitter accounts. Last time round, just under 36000 accounts had Tweeted at least three times, had at least one Swedish follower or followed at least one Swede, and Tweeted at least once in the 30 days up to when the analysis of the account was performed. The comparable figure in this year’s census is 171000. An increase of 475% in about 15 months.
Very active Swedes
Last year, the “Twitter elite” as Hampus jokingly named them, were 11215. These were people who, on average, tweeted at least once a day during December 2010. The number of very active accounts has risen in in line with the overall number of active accounts In April 2012 the figure stands at 52887.
It’s still the case that a relatively small number of Twitter users account for the vast majority of tweets. 7% of users have generated 75% of tweets.
Flashback
Although the Swedish user base has moved beyond the technology interested and those working within media, Twitter is still not commonplace and is dwarfed in size by Facebook (which in many age groups has a 100% reach in Sweden), and probably beaten by a number of other forums and networks such as Flashback, Linkedin and perhaps even Instagram.
Size isn’t everything and although the survey has shown that the vast majority of accounts show little sign of activity, there is an increasingly diversified set of clusters and communities containing active users. In some of these clusters, Twitter is an important platform for communication.
The state of Swedish websites 2012
Each year Web Service Award surveys Swedish web responsibles and web managers their opinion about the quality of their web sites and working environment as well as how they are intending to develop them.
570 Swedish web managers were surveyed during January of this year for the 2012 trend report including representatives from companies, public services, councils, and other organisations.
The proportion of each type of organisation (and indeed size) is not representative of Sweden as a whole. Large companies and organisations are hugely over-represented (76% of those surveyed, whilst only 0.56% of the total in Sweden), and smaller companies are massively under-represented (24% of survey, but 76% in Sweden as a whole). So some care has to be taken with the figures.
This survey gives us an insight into what web managers think and how they feel about the world of web they work with. It’s not a survey of the visitors of websites, neither is it a survey of management or, ultimately, decision makers.
The report (in Swedish) is a whopping 98 pages. There’s a huge amount of data in there. I’m just going to write about a few points which I feel deserve highlighting.
The year of mobile development
Almost half of respondents said that they will be increasing their digital investments in 2012 compared to 2011. It would appear that a good chunk of that money is going to go into developing mobile solutions. 42% said that they are planning to produce a mobile ready version of their website, and 21% said they were planning a mobile app during 2012.
61% said that they didn’t currently have any form of mobile solution (neither app of mobile ready website), so if the web responsibles surveyed manage to achieve what they’ve planned then next year this figure should drop through the floor! 2012 is looking like the year of mobile development.
Lack of resources internally
Despite a constantly increasing amount of investment in digital channels, there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in internal resources that take care of them.
I find it quite shocking that despite the importance of websites for organisations, and the money invested in (re)developing them, a staggering 50% of respondents only work half-time with their sites. Only 23% at most are dedicated web managers working full time with their sites. Only 32% say that they have enough resources to manage their website’s content.
Given that almost half of the organisations surveyed are large organisations with over 500 employees (44%), the low number of dedicated web responsibles cannot be explained solely by a corresponding percentage of SME sites where it is would be more expected that a person has multiple roles.
With the time and knowledge needed to order from and work with external agencies, analyse and reflect upon visitor statistics and KPIs, take on board usability testing results, deciding what to A/B test and tweak on your website, chase content owners, meet and work with internal stake holders – amongst many other things – it’s no wonder that so many websites under deliver, or need to be (at often great cost) totally rebuilt every few years,
EpiServer dominates
Amongst the sites in the survey, EpiServer dominates overwhelmingly as the CMS of choice for the larger organisations (over 50 employees) with 50% using the Swedish platform to server up their websites.
It’s a different picture amongst the smaller organisations surveyed (less than 50 employees). Here we see EpiServer’s being used as the publishing tool for 22% of surveyed websites. 36% responded with “other”, which presumably includes an array of CMS tools created by smaller companies.
I’m surprised that WordPress didn’t feature higher amongst smaller companies. My experience is that it’s pretty much the default CMS choice for this size of company, but only 1% across the entire survey irrespective of organisation size (which is presumably just 5 respondents) said that WordPress powered their website.
Positive trends
Generally speaking most stats in the report point to positive developments with websites and how they are managed. One of the exceptions is the lack of (dedicated) resources to run, maintain and develop the web and digital presence of an organisation.
We’re learning and moving forward as web managers and web professionals, but It’s still early days, and I think many of the answers show that.