First state of the Twitosphere in Argentina

I already published several blogposts on this blog with an analysis of the Twitosphere in several countries (see the sidebar). On the previous analysis (for Brazil) a commenter mentioned an Argentinian initiative called Tuitiar.com (a blog and a Twitter account). So it won't be a surprise that the next country analyzed is Argentina.

Using the same approach as for the previous countries, I managed to find 896 active Twitter accounts from Argentina. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Argentina if the location explicitely refers to Argentina or if the Twitter user was located in Argentina according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Argentinian 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 40,3 million people (according to Wikipedia), Argentina has 896 Twitter accounts, which means that there is a Argentinian Twitter account for every 45,000 inhabitants. Currently for Iceland and the Netherlands there is one Twitter account for roughly 10,000 inhabitants.


History of the Argentinian Twitter accounts
This graph below shows the history of the Argentinian Twitter accounts. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Argentinian Twitter accounts.



Oldest Twitter accounts from Argentina
http://twitter.com/Leech - Leandro Ardissone - first message on 28/09/2006
http://twitter.com/2Curious - 2Curious - first message on 29/10/2006
http://twitter.com/pugvichka - pugvichka - first message on 4/11/2006
http://twitter.com/dfgonzalez - Diego - first message on 21/11/2006
http://twitter.com/slaff - slaff - first message on 1/12/2006


Public of Private
Only 37 Twitter acounts from Argentina or 3.2% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends. In the analyzed European countries this percentage varied from 3.5% (Italy) to 22% (Belgium).

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 20% of the Argentinian Twitter accounts do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Argentina follows 46.8 Twitter accounts. In the analyzed European countries this average varied from 9.6 (Belgium) to 32 (Italy). There are several Twitter accounts from Argentina with a relatively high number of following, see the top 5 below.



Top 5
http://twitter.com/Pachoro - Pachoro - 1111 following
http://twitter.com/espina - niñoespina - 1010 following
http://twitter.com/simonapalermo - simonapalermo - 800 following
http://twitter.com/elpeor - elpeor - 715 following
http://twitter.com/flowmi - flowmi - 684 following


Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 8% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. An average Twitter account from Argentina has 46.3 followers. This average is higher than the averages observed for the European countries : between 10.5 (Belgium) to 26 (Italy). There are several Twitter accounts from Argentina with a relatively high number of followers, see the top 5 below.



Top 5
http://twitter.com/tuitiar - Tuitiar.com - 628 followers
http://twitter.com/Conz - Conz - 516 followers
http://twitter.com/espina - niñoespina - 495 followers
http://twitter.com/dariogallo - d.g. - 472 followers
http://twitter.com/mancini - Pablo Mancini - 410 followers


Updates
Only 3% of the accounts from Argentina are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Argentina has 225 updates, which is again higher than the averages observed for the European countries from 72 (Belgium) to 106 (Italy and Spain). Please keep in mind that these averages are only snapshots, as lots of new Twitter messages (or Tweets) are published every day.



Top 5
http://twitter.com/lanacioncom - La Nacion - 6418 updates
http://twitter.com/pabloaltclas - paltclas - 5210 updates
http://twitter.com/mtorchiari - Marina Torchiari - 5162 updates
http://twitter.com/espina - niñoespina - 5113 updates
http://twitter.com/clarincom - clarincom - 4087 updates


Degree of activity
40% of all Twitter accounts from Argentina with a public feed did not post an update in the last 20 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

45% of all Twitter accounts from Argentina with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive. This percentage (45%) is significantly higher than the percentages of active users observed for the European countries. This percentage is comparable to the percentage observed for the twitosphere in Brazil (52%0.


Conclusion
This state of the Argentinian Twitosphere is only a snapshot, meaning that the figures mentioned in this post have already changed because the Twitosphere is a very dynamic environment with several new accounts being created every day, new connections being made between accounts (following/followers) and of course new messages being written every hour of the day.

Users from Argentina were not among the first to start using Twitter, the first Twitter user only appeared at the end of September 2006, followed by the next one exactly one month later. There was an increase in the number of Twitter users in Argentina from March/April 2007, about at the same time as for the analyzed European countries. Where the growth in Europe slowed down, the creation of new Twitter accounts in Argentina accelerated from the beginning of August 2007.

The current Twitter community in Argentina is increasing day by day, the percentage of active Twitter accounts is higher than in the analyzed European countries. The future for Twitter in Argentina looks bright.