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.