Second state of the Belgian Twitosphere

On April 17, 2007 I published the first state of the Twitosphere in Belgium, my home country. With this new state of the Twitosphere I want to give an idea how the Belgium Twitosphere has evolved since then.

Using the same approach as for the first state of the Twitosphere, I managed to find 854 active Twitter accounts from Belgium. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Belgium if the location explicitely refers to Belgium or if the Twitter user was located in Belgium according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Belgian Twitter users is probably higher as only 50% of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post).

For a population of 10.5 million people (according to Wikipedia), Belgium has 854 Twitter accounts, which means that there is a Twitter account for every 12,295 inhabitants.

History of the Belgian Twitter accounts
This graph below shows the history of the Belgian Twitter accounts. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Belgian Twitter accounts. For the 107 private Twitter accounts the date of the first message is not accessible. In addition to that, there are still 25 Belgian Twitter accounts without a single update, they are still waiting for the first message to be published. This leads to a graph based on 693 Twitter accounts. The growth of the number of Twitter accounts in Belgium accelerated from mid March 2007. This accelerated growth seems to continue until now.


Degree of activity
The graph below is generated only for the Twitter accounts where I could determine the date of the first message and the date of the last message, meaning that Twitter users without messages and private Twitter accounts were left out.

The graph contains two parts. In the upper part, Twitter users who have published at least one Twitter message in the last 14 days are plotted as a line, starting from the date of the first message to the date of the last message. The color of the line depends on the number of messages published (also called updates). The lower part contains Twitters users without updates in the last 14 dates. These accounts can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

The lines in the lower part of the graph are much shorter and show almost no colors, confirming the hypothesis that these Twitter accounts are inactive.


Types of Twitters users in Belgium
A while ago I published a blogpost describing 4 types of Twitter users : Lurkers, Bots, High Influentials and Twitter Stars.

On the graph below all 854 Belgian Twitter users are plotted according to their number of updates and the number of followers. There are currently no High Influential Twitter users (high number of followers but low number of updates). There are several Bots - Twitter accounts where the messages are automatically generated (low number of followers and very high number of updates). Luckily there are several Twitter Stars in Belgium, e.g. twitter.com/aguerra, twitter.com/emichbe, twitter.com/erlend, twitter.com/mvuijlst, twitter.com/netlash, twitter.com/pascalvanhecke, twitter.com/Pietel, twitter.com/robinwauters and twitter.com/vpieters.


Top lists
To conclude this state of the Twitosphere, I present here top lists of Twitter accounts according to different criteria.

Oldest Twitter accounts from Belgium
http://twitter.com/zingo - Martin - first message on 22/08/2006
http://twitter.com/BuzzWorkers - Ben Borges - first message on 21/09/2006
http://twitter.com/onepointzero - Colin O'Brien - first message on 22/09/2006
http://twitter.com/lode - Lode - first message on 26/09/2006
http://twitter.com/cruchon - Nicolas Jacobeus - first message on 28/09/2006

Top 5 Following
http://twitter.com/thesisters - Anna & Betty - 503 following
http://twitter.com/robinwauters - Robin Wauters - 192 following
http://twitter.com/bartvanbelle - Bart Van Belle - 155 following
http://twitter.com/GDB - Geert De Busschere - 128 following
http://twitter.com/vpieters - Veerle Pieters - 124 following

Top 5 Followers
http://twitter.com/vpieters - Veerle Pieters - 845 followers
http://twitter.com/aguerra - Andrea Guerra - 244 followers
http://twitter.com/netlash - Bart - 179 followers
http://twitter.com/robinwauters - Robin Wauters - 151 followers
http://twitter.com/peterelst - Peter Elst - 143 followers

Top 5 Updates - manualy generated Twitter messages
http://twitter.com/netlash - Bart - 1869 updates
http://twitter.com/emichbe - Michaël Uyttersprot - 1677 updates
http://twitter.com/atog - Koen Van der Auwera - 1585 updates
http://twitter.com/postback - vincent m - 1559 updates
http://twitter.com/aguerra - Andrea Guerra - 1493 updates

Top 5 Updates - automatically generated Twitter messages
http://twitter.com/dsonline - De Standaard Online - 21513 updates
http://twitter.com/ClopMonitor - ClopMonitor - 15937 updates
http://twitter.com/rtlinfo - RTL Info - 7076 updates
http://twitter.com/EUXTV - E U X . T V - 2129 updates
http://twitter.com/lesoir - Le Soir - 2076 updates