Beantin

James Royal-Lawson

Twitter

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.


475474 Swedish Twitter accounts

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…

James Royal-Lawson+ is a freelance digital strategist based in Stockholm Sweden.

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.


299000 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.

Graph showing the increase over time to 299000 Swedish Twitter accounts

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.

James Royal-Lawson+ is a digital strategist and web manager based in Stockholm Sweden.

How many Twitter users in Sweden 2011?

At the beginning of this year, Itellecta Corporate presented the results of their Twitter Census, based on data collected in December 2010.

This week Aitellu has presented their research, based on data from the last week of November 2011.

They found that there were 146995 Swedish Twitter accounts.

146995 Swedish Twitter accounts

What counts as a Swedish account?

Twitter bios were analysed and profiles with Sweden as their location or one of 20 Swedish cities (including certain recognised abbreviations) were classed as Swedish.

Also included were profiles with a bio written in Swedish.

Who gets missed?

As with Twitter census, this method of counting misses anyone who hasn’t filled in their bio or location, as well as anyone tweeting in another language than Swedish during the sample period (such as English). It will though include people with protected tweets that meet the above criteria.

Any Swedish account that isn’t followed by another Swedish account will also be missed due to the way accounts were crawled.

This figure also includes Swedish businesses, organisations and non-human accounts as well as people.

How many active Twitter users?

According to the information given in this tweet 83029 of the 146995 Swedish Twitter accounts have tweeted during the past month (which presumably is the month up to the 20th of December 2011).

83029 active Swedish Twitter accounts

The number of active Twitter accounts according to Intellecta’s study was 35993 – but these two figures are not comparable as Hampus Brynolf used a much narrower definition of what was active.

Growth

Even though the methods used to measure differ between the two studies, it’s reasonably safe to say that the number of Swedish Twitter accounts has increased during 2011. At the moment though, it’s difficult to come to any conclusions on the number of active Twitter users.

Let’s hope that Aitellu release some further details, including some figures that are more comparable with the Twitter Census.

Update 2012-01-18

Aitellu hasn’t released their own further details yet, but Ajour has been given a preview. They have revised the number of Swedish accounts upwards slightly to 153,000 and come up with a figure of 87,000 active Swedish accounts – which according to Ajour was produced using the same critera as Intellecta.

It’s can be exactly the same critera due to the different methods used to collect the data, but it is never the less possible to say that there has been a signficant increase in the number of active Twitter accounts here in Sweden during the past year.

James Royal-Lawson+ is a digital strategist and web manager based in Stockholm Sweden.

Twitter users in Sweden: demographics

Intellecta Corporate have presented some additional findings based on new analysis of their data collected from Twitter during December 2010. In the previous presentation they came to the conclusion that there were 35993 active Twitter users in Sweden.

The new analysis focused on segmentation of the active twitter accounts. How many were companies? how many were people? how many were women? what professional is most common?

Location

They analysed the location given for each account. Unfortunately the majority of of the 91316 Swedish Twitter accounts didn’t give any location, or any useful/specific location. So even though there were 11000 Accounts that listed Stockholm as their location, it’s impossible to say anything more than at least 11000 Twitter users are in Stockholm.

Age

There’s no direct way of establishing the age of Twitter users, but Hampus analysed the names given – which can give you an indication of the generation of those tweeting. Many of the most common names are names that you would generally associate with people born in the 1970s. (that is a personal guess by me, without any checking of official name data.)

Gender

Next up was one of the more interesting statistics – the gender of Twitter users. Of those accounts that could be determined to be human, and that had a name where it was possible to determine the gender – 33284 accounts had a male name, and 26119 had a female name. this equates to a 56/44% male female split.

Amongst active users (those who have tweeted at least once a day during a 30 day period) the split tilts even more towards men. 61/39%. Active Swedish men on twitter made more updates, followed more people, and were followed by more than their female counterparts.

Occupation

A list of the most common occupation related words used in bios was also presented. I don’t think this can be taken too seriously, due to the way in which the bio field is used by people. Some people use it to describe themselves, others to describe why they are on Twitter (what they are interested in).

Some people have professions where there is a universally accepted term to describe that profession. Others perhaps work with something that has a large variation of titles. Never the less, journalist was the most common occupational word. Followed by student and manager. One thing I found interesting was that the list contained 6 English words, 3 words/phrases that are the same in Swedish and English, and just 3 that were exclusively Swedish.

Who Tweets?

Last up was – who is it that Tweets? 85% of the accounts analysed were people, 11% were companies, organisations and public authorities. Twitter in Sweden, unsurprisingly perhaps, is a very human thing.

The presentation can be found on Slideshare (in Swedish) and the video of the presentation (also in Swedish) can be found on Bambuser.

is a freelance web manager and strategist based in Stockholm Sweden.

Google Social search: followers and follows

This week Google rolled out a new feature to it’s SERPs and snippets when logged in. If you have a Google Profile and Google has indexed who you are connected to, there’s a chance that you will see a small profile picture along with a name and the text “shared this on <someplace>”.

a search result showing that a friend had share this page on Twitter

This is Google taking another step forward in integrating information it gathers about your social graph into it’s search results. This, of course, has a number of implications. You can read a bit more about the feature and what Google themselves have said about it in this Tech Crunch article.

Your connections

What isn’t apparent at first is who, exactly, are your friends. My initial presumption was that it was just the people I followed (on Twitter), but after a few searches it became apparent that it was both the people I follow and the people who follow me.

two snippets one showing sharing information from a follower on Twitter, the other sharing information from someone I follow

As you can see from the example above, the 4th and 5th placed search results are both indicated as being shared by people I’m connected to. I follow Alan Colville (Klout of 44), but Steve Cook (Klout of 23) follows me (I have Steve on a list, but I don’t directly follow him)..

Impact on SERPs

How much, if any, have those two tweets impacted upon the order of the results? Well, by logging out and doing a clean search for the same phrase the same two results are now 4th (still) and 9th. The second result has now dropped 4 places.

the two snippets from the previous example are 4 places further apart when not logged in

Ok, a number of additional factors could also be playing a role in moving that 9th placed result up to 5th – and as I didn’t do this test with the same Google account before this feature was launched I can’t say for sure how much of this movement is down to the shared link data. But I suspect it’s playing some part in it.

Importance of Twitter

What this does mean though, is that suddenly, following people on (public) social networks (in particular twitter) could lift the ranking of pages you’ve shared in those people’s search results. From an SEO perspective, the number of people you follow (and who follow you) became something to consider.

Shared links and little profile pictures makes Google’s use of this data really very obvious – but that’s limited to people logged into Google. What we can’t see as easily is how much Google is using this data in it’s regular organic search results, but we have seen from other case studies that it seems to already be a factor.

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