Barry Hand

Sim­ple ques­tion, not so sim­ple answer.

I asked last night from twit­ter for some esti­mates and most replies were in the 40,000 – 50,000 mark.

My esti­mate is 150,000 and here’s why…

Fol­low­ing on from from my post on Irish web­site usage, I’ve drilled down a lit­tle fur­ther to see how accu­rate or not the Google Ad Plan­ner data is and to see if there’s any insight into how many users from Ire­land twit­ter has.

Damien Mul­ley found stats that Ire­land counts for 0.52% of total Twit­ter users, putting us 17th in the world. Although the report cal­cu­lated loca­tion with “pro­pri­etary tech­nol­ogy to infer geog­ra­phy based on user dis­closed infor­ma­tion which does not rely on Twitter’s geo-location API.” and may not be as use­ful as it appears, but it’s a good start­ing point and with the lack of any­thing else, let’s run with it.

The stats taken from Google Ad Plan­ner show 200k Unique Vis­i­tors (UV) from Ire­land in Decem­ber, which is 6.9% reach of total web users (2.9M) — generating a mam­moth 15M page views. Again from Ad Plan­ner, tak­ing the total twit​ter​.com unique vis­i­tors and Irish spe­cific traf­fic, we see around 0.27% of all twit​ter​.com traf­fic orig­i­nat­ing from Ireland.

Of that 200k UV, you could assume that the total num­ber of Irish twit­ter users to be as high as 400k because more than half of all users (55 per­cent) use a Twit­ter app, but I doubt if we’re look­ing at such a huge amount and the Ad Plan­ner data cov­ers the UV for the full month and I’d expect that users would use the web inter­face occa­sion­ally through­out a month.

So cal­cu­lat­ing total Irish twit­ter users is prov­ing a lit­tle tricky, mainly due to Twit­ter not pub­lish­ing total account numbers.The esti­mated twit­ter usage is at 18 mllion in the US, Inter­est­ingly Ad Plan­ner shows 19 mil­lion UV from the US dur­ing Decem­ber 2009. Again using the Syso­mos report, the US con­tributed 50.88% of total twit­ter users. So assum­ing total twit­ter accounts in the 36 mil­lion region — would it be fair to say that Ire­land has 184,000 users?

Let’s hit up Google for some more stats — this time using some search strings to see is <a target=“_blank” href=“http://www.google.ie/search?q=intext:” bio+*+”+intext:“location+*+“ireland””+site:twitter.com””>“Ireland” indexed in users bio’s which returns 128,00 results, although I’m not con­vinced of that rel­e­vance as the page list­ings end after about 900 results, some­thing dis­cussed at We are Social’s blog.

Time to go back and look at the ini­tial 200k fig­ure, this time using Google Trends for a daily break­down. The pro­file below ties in with what I would expect a 200k monthly UV web­site to look like, run­ning between 30-40k daily uniques.

Twit​ter​.com usage dur­ing Decem­ber 2009

And look­ing fur­ther back to see where we are in terms of growth, which is pretty steady from the start the year peak­ing in early June.

Twit​ter​.com usage over last 12 months

So being fairly con­fi­dent of the traf­fic stats from Google which ties in with the research from Syso­mos, I’m going to esti­mate that there are 150,000 Irish twit­ter accounts, by com­par­i­son there are over 1.2M Face­book users in Ire­land (source: Face­book advertising)

While the twit​ter​.com web­site has 200k esti­mated UV from Ire­land, I’m also con­sid­er­ing that there is a dupli­ca­tion in that num­ber. Also vis­i­tor num­bers would never be equal to accounts as some of that may be search traf­fic as twit­ter status’s are now included in Google search results.

So am I over-estimating usage? or does the dor­mant accounts dwarf the active users result­ing in skewed num­bers, but that’s a whole other story, until then I’m going to run with 150,000