First state of the Twitosphere in Chile

Last week I published an analysis of the Twitosphere in Argentina. In August I published an analysis of the Twitosphere in Brazil. On this analysis (for Brazil) a commenter mentioned an Argentinian initiative called Tuitiar.com but he also indicated that Chile has the highest Internet penetration of Latin America. I wanted to verify wether Chile has also a very active Twitter community.

Using the same approach as for all previous analyzed countries, I was able to find 593 active Twitter accounts from Chile. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Chile if the location explicitely refers to Chile or if the Twitter user was located in Chile according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Chilean 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 16.6 million people (according to Wikipedia), Chile has 593 Twitter accounts, which means that there is a Chilean Twitter account for every 28,000 inhabitants. Currently for Iceland and the Netherlands there is one Twitter account for roughly 10,000 inhabitants. The two other South American countries had a significant lower penetration of Twitter (Argentina : 1 for every 45,000 inhabitants, Brazil : 1 for every 451,000 inhabitants).


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



Oldest Twitter accounts from Chile
http://twitter.com/OjoPiojo - Rodrigo Guaiquil - first message on 12/10/2006
http://twitter.com/paulbeelen - Paul Beelen - first message on 22/10/2006
http://twitter.com/ochovio - ochovio - first message on 17/11/2006
http://twitter.com/juque - Juan Pablo Aqueveque - first message on 17/11/2006
http://twitter.com/wachunei - wachunei - first message on 18/11/2006

The first Twitter user I was able to identify only showed up mid October 2006, several months later compared to other countries. The popularity of Twitter started to grow from March/April 2007. The graph reveals that this growth is still continuing, with even an acceleration from August 2007.


Public of Private
77 Twitter acounts from Chile or 13% 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). For Argentina this percentage was only 3.2%.


Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 26% of the Chilean Twitter accounts do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Chile follows 14.4 Twitter accounts. In the analyzed European countries this average varied from 9.6 (Belgium) to 32 (Italy). For Argentina the average was much higher : 46.8. Chilean Twitter accounts are on average followed by less other Twitter users compared to Argentinian Twitter accounts.



Top 5
http://twitter.com/crhistian - crhistian - 174 following
http://twitter.com/fmeza - Fernando Meza - 162 following
http://twitter.com/DonPepe - Don Pepe - 157 following
http://twitter.com/dubo - César Dubó - 153 following
http://twitter.com/eduardoe - Eduardo Escarez - 146 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. 9% 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 Chile has 16.5 followers. This average is in line with the averages observed for the European countries : between 10.5 (Belgium) to 26 (Italy). The average for Chile is however again lower than the average for Argentina : 46.



Top 5
http://twitter.com/mariapastora - M. Pastora Sandoval - 210 followers
http://twitter.com/dubo - César Dubó - 196 followers
http://twitter.com/OjoPiojo - Rodrigo Guaiquil - 173 followers
http://twitter.com/crhistian - crhistian - 162 followers
http://twitter.com/Paloma - Paloma Baytelman - 153 followers


Updates
5% of the accounts from Chile are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Chile has 215 updates, which is again higher than the averages observed for the European countries from 72 (Belgium) to 106 (Italy and Spain). This time the average for Chile is comparable to the average for Argentina (225). 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/sepulveda - Diego Sepulveda - 4.939 updates
http://twitter.com/latercera - La Tercera - 4.917 updates
http://twitter.com/Cooperativa - Radio Cooperativa - 4.313 updates
http://twitter.com/Sauce - Sauce - 3.879 updates
http://twitter.com/rots - Rodrigo Vera - 3.832 updates


Degree of activity
37% of all Twitter accounts from Chile with a public feed did not post an update in the last 20 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

48% of all Twitter accounts from Chile with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive. This percentage (48%) is comparable to the percentages for Argentina (45%) and Brazil (52%). It is significantly higher than the percentages of active users observed for the European countries. The South American Twitospheres seem more active than the European Twitospheres.


Conclusion
This state of the Chilean 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 Chile were rather late to start using Twitter, the first Twitter user only appeared mid October 2006. The popularity of Twitter in Chile started to rize 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 Chile continued steadily.

The Twitter community in Chile is in absolute numbers not as big as the Twitter community in Argentina, but the number of Twitter users divided by the size of the population indicate that there are relatively more Twitter users in Chile (more than twice as much). It is very well possible that this is caused by the fact that Chile has the highest Internet penetration of Latin America.

The main difference of the Twitter communities in Argentina and Chile is that the Twitter community in Argentina is much more interlinked. On average each Twitter account is following more Twitter users.