First state of the Twitosphere in Australia

Twitter is used in almost every country on this globe, including in the countries down under. This time I will share some figures concerning the twitosphere in Australia.

Using the same approach as for the previous countries, I managed to find 3641 active Twitter accounts from Australia. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Australia if the location explicitely refers to Australia or if the Twitter user was located in Australia according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Australian 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 21.2 million people (according to Wikipedia), Australia has 3641 Twitter accounts, meaning that there is a Australian Twitter account for every 5,823 inhabitants.

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


Oldest Twitter accounts from Australia
http://twitter.com/dataphage - dataphage - first message on 20/07/2006
http://twitter.com/sailor - Wilson - first message on 10/08/2006
http://twitter.com/sinisterfrog - sinisterfrog - first message on 26/08/2006
http://twitter.com/celia141 - Celia - first message on 27/08/2006
http://twitter.com/jngo - John - first message on 9/09/2006

Public of Private
336 Twitter acounts from Australia or 9.2% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends.

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 17% of the Australian Twitter accounts do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Australia follows 24 Twitter accounts.


Top 5
http://twitter.com/dan7 - Daniel - 3.460 following
http://twitter.com/grum - Chris Barraud - 2.110 following
http://twitter.com/JINXIE - Jacinta Gascoigne - 1.853 following
http://twitter.com/petendonna - Peter & Donna - 1.180 following
http://twitter.com/problogger - Darren Rowse - 906 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 Australia has 26 followers.


Top 5
http://twitter.com/Ed_Dale - Ed Dale - 1.992 followers
http://twitter.com/dan7 - Daniel - 1.634 followers
http://twitter.com/Kitta - Kitta - 1.606 followers
http://twitter.com/problogger - Darren Rowse - 1.474 followers
http://twitter.com/duncanriley - Duncan Riley - 1.063 followers

Updates
Only 3% of the accounts from Australia are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Australia has 213 updates.


Top 5
http://twitter.com/aflbot - aflbot - 11.645 updates
http://twitter.com/Tuna - Gary Barber - 11.634 updates
http://twitter.com/andrewbarnett - andrew barnett - 11.560 updates
http://twitter.com/baggygreen - baggygreen - 10.510 updates
http://twitter.com/jjprojects - John Johnston - 10.057 updates

Tweet frequency
The tweet frequency is the average number of Twitter messages - also called Tweets - a Twitter users produces on a single day. I did only consider the Twitter users who have posted messages over a periode longer than 30 days.


Top 5
http://twitter.com/baggygreen - baggygreen - 152,32 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/cmail_breaking - CourierMail Breaking - 74,31 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/aflbot - aflbot - 36,97 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/1000Monkeys - 1000Monkeys - 35,38 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/jjprojects - John Johnston - 31,63 tweets/day

Degree of activity
48% of all Twitter accounts from Australia with a public feed did not post an update in the last 30 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

34% of all Twitter accounts from Australia with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive.

Conclusion
This state of the Australian 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 Australia were among the first to start using Twitter (from July 2006). From November 2006 the number of users increased at an higher rate. From April 2007 the growth in the Australian twitosphere accelerated further. The growth remained at the same speed from April 2007 until now.

The penetration of the number of Twitter users in Australia is very high compared to other countries previously analyzed, only Iceland - with a very small Twitter community - has an higher penetration.