Who is Winning Canadian Geomatics Hearts and Minds on Twitter?

Who is Listening to you on Twitter?

If you or your business aren’t on Twitter you might not even realize there is a Canadian geomatics conversation going on in the Twitter-verse.  GoGeomatics Canada is on Twitter (@GoGeomatics)  communicating jobs, events, news, and the general going-ons in the Canadian geomatics world to our followers.  We also tweet out a glossary of geomatics definitions so we edify as well as inform.  (You students out there might want to follow us and learn something for your next exam!)

In a moment you might have thought to yourself…. “Hey, I should be on Twitter or  better yet my geomatics company/group/club/non-profit should be tweeting!”  Slow down there Tex. You might be right or you might be wrong.  Jumping into Twitter or any social media can be rewarding but it can also be a serious drain on you and your organizations energy and resources.  GoGeomatics has a whole marketing side you might not be aware of and we advise clients and partners on the best way to approach social media for geomatics.  Beware, social media is not for the faint of heart. It’s not like traditional marketing and communications channels. On social media your audience talks back and you might not always like what they have to say.  Who is out there to talk to anyway?

Earlier this week the GoGeomatics Canada team  gathered around the virtual water-cooler and asked ourselves; who is listening to the Canadian geomatics conversation and who is engaged in it?

Well lucky for you we have tools to look at Twitter followers and see what they are talking about and what they are interested in.  So we decided to pick a few Canadian geomatics Twitter handles and have a look at their followers and a few other indicators of strength.  When we break it down we see that with social media it’s not just about what you say but who you say it to.  We should also be able to see who is leveraging Twitter effectively.   The accounts chosen represent  typical Twitter users in the Canadian geomatics community.

Lets have look at the Twitter accounts for this analysis.

GoGeomatics has taken a sample of Canadian geomatics Twitter accounts on April 18th 2013 to compare.  For the most part each of these accounts is quite active.  The @ESRiCanada and @GoGeomatics  handles are corporate accounts.   @andrewmdavidson is a personal account for a government scientist working  in remote sensing.  @CanadianGISgirl  is a student in GIS at Algonquin College.  The one government account is the @NRCan.  We have two association accounts @Manitobagis and @CanGeographers.

Followers by Geographic Location & Twitter Account Start Date

@Manitobagis  82 Following, 97 followers

0 new Followers in the last month

Joined Twitter 4th March 2012  (13 months)

@NRCAN 163 Following, 436 Followers

84 new Followers in the last month

Joined Twitter 16th February 2012  (14 months)

@GoGeomatics 1,919 Following, 1,875 Followers

78 new Followers in the last month

Joined Twitter 23rd November 2009 (42 months)

@AndrewMDavidson 155 Following, 102 Followers

2 new Followers in the last month

Joined Twitter 2nd February 2010 (38 months)

@CanGeographers 1,583 Following, 959 Followers

100 new Followers in the last month

Joined Twitter 18th October 2012  (6 months)

@ESRICanada 3,071 Following, 3,202 Followers

54 new Followers in the last month

Joined Twitter 20th May 2009 (48 months)

@CanadianGISgirl 317 Following, 322 Followers

30 New Followers in the last month

Joined Twitter 5th June 2012 (10 months)

What are the Followers Interests?

GoGeomatics uses a tool that creates a fun word cloud from the bios of the followers twitter accounts. From that we get a picture of the interests of each following group.   The more times a word is used the larger and more prominent it is displayed in the cloud.  This quickly gives us a good idea as to what is important to those followers.

@Manitobagis followers are interested in:

@NRCAN followers are interested in:

@GoGeomatics followers are interested in:

@AndrewMDavidson followers are interested in:

@CanGeographers followers are interested in:

@ESRICanada followers are interested in:

@CanadianGISgirl followers are interested in:

Respect My Authority

Each Twitter user is assigned an authority ranking between 0 to 10 – with 10 signifying someone with very high reach and influence. This authority ranking is based on the number of followers, following, updates, retweets and several similar measures.  Below you will see how each accounts followers are grouped by authority.

@Manitobagis Followers Authority:

@NRCAN Followers Authority:

@GoGeomatics Followers Authority:

@AndrewMDavidson Followers Authority:

@CanGeographers Followers Authority:

@ESRICanada Followers Authority:

@CanadianGISgirl Followers Authority:

What a Tangled Web We Weave

Lets have a look at a really interesting graph.  GoGeomatics Canada uses a tool which graphs what the most mentioned  topics and keywords are in relation to each account Twitter handles.  Association between different keywords is represented by edges between them which can be bold, simple, or dashed based on the strength of association. Strongly related words, which frequently appear together, have darker edges between them.  There is no relation to distance from centre.

@Manitobagis

There have been too few mentions of the @Manitobagis Twitter handle to graph.

@NRCAN

@GoGeomatics

@AndrewMDavidson

@CanGeographers

@ESRICanada

@CanadianGISgirl

So What?

We’ve come to the end of this article and we’ve looked at quite a few things for each Twitter account. But we have only scratched the surface. Most of what we have looked at is related to the followers of these accounts and some basic stats.  I will come back to these accounts and explore what this means and add a few other indicators to the mix to help us out.  So this article will have a second part to it.  

I will leave you with a few clues though to help you figure out what is important.  Look at the start dates for the accounts and the number of followers.  Then think about the marketing machine or lack of marketing machine that is behind each entity.  Who seems to be punching  their way above their weight on Twitter? Who well below?  Another clue as to how everybody is doing is the number of new followers each month.  I look forward to seeing some comments below.