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 twitter.com unique visitors and Irish specific traffic, we see around 0.27% of all twitter.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.
Twitter.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.
Twitter.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 twitter.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
