Social capital, the added value of social media for municipalities' . One of the conclusions was that many municipalities do not have user figures in the area of social media. How many residents in the municipality now use Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin? We can now answer that question.
37 million tweets in one week
Because it is difficult to analyze Linkedin and Facebook profiles in practice, we have chosen to focus on Twitter profiles when mapping how many people are currently active on social media per municipality. Together with Ewoud de Voogd (HowAboutYou) and Alex Slatman (OBI4wan) we have analyzed all Twitter messages from the Netherlands that appeared in the week of January 14 to 20, 2013. These more than 37 million messages appear to have been sent from 1.7 million Twitter accounts.
The research presented by Newcom Research & Consultancy in mid-February 2013 into the use of social list to data media in the Netherlands tells us that 3.3 million Dutch people use Twitter, of which 1.6 million log in daily. This confirms our measurement.
We then analyzed whether the bios or messages contained location data. This turned out to be the case for almost 400,000 accounts. The names used, sometimes municipal names, sometimes village names or synonyms such as 030 or 's Gravenhage and Den Haag, have all been traced back to one of the names of the more than 400 municipalities in our country. This provides an overview of the number of Twitter accounts per municipality.
Location data in Twitter bios
Location data in Twitter bios
Because this is a very large number, we can extrapolate these numbers with location data to the total number of Twitter users in a municipality. This involves a factor of 4: from the 400,000 localized Twitter accounts to a total of 1.7 million accounts. To illustrate: suppose the name of a municipality is included in 100 Twitter accounts, then it is reasonable to assume that there are approximately 400 people active on Twitter in that municipality. In this case, we assume active Twitter accounts (1.7 million) and not the total number of Twitter accounts (3.3 million).