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.
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).
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.