A few months ago we wrote a story asking if Twitter’s trending topics algorithms were anti-Boston. The company claimed there wasn’t a high enough volume of Tweets in Boston to display what was trending. We thought this seemed a little bogus given the activity we see every day, and especially considering all the colleges here. Seemingly thanks to calling them out, Boston got trending tweets not more than a week later.
Today, Cambridge-based inbound marketing machine HubSpot made it known just what sort of a hotbed Massachusetts really is for Twitter. They posted a Twitter Territory infographic, “Twitter Usage Per Capita: How States Compare,” and guess who topped the chart? That’s right – Massachusetts.
Massachusetts is not only the #1 state for Twitter use per capita, but it is also the state to enjoy the second most growth from 2009 to 2010. This is fantastic considering Boston is positioning itself as the hub of new marketing, and that companies like oneforty are based right here in the Hub (the app store for Twitter that is now making a pivot more broadly into other areas of social media). Fun fact: Twitter also has servers here in Boston, according to Wikipedia.
Massachusetts is flagged at 69 percent — a number which represents how much higher our state’s per capita usage is compared to the national average. California, for example, was at 47 percent higher than the national average and New York was at 31 percent.
HubSpot pulled the data from their Twitter Grader product, a free tool that allows you to check the power of your twitter profile compared to millions of other users who have been graded. As you can see from my query on Twitter Grader, HubSpot knows your location from your profile information as it connects with and pulls data from Twitter’s API (a programming interface that allows developers to build applications that integrate with Twitter’s data and proprietary code). Although “usage” is not defined by HubSpot in the post, we assume this map is based on aggregate Twitter usage data vs. Twitter Grader grades which they posted about last year at this time. According to a HubSpotter’s comments on the post, “Our dataset is made up of a large sample of Twitter users (i.e. it is not the entire population), so while we cannot provide a national average, we are able to analyze how states compare to each other and their growth year-over-year.”
Regardless, HubSpot’s takeaway from the data: “Going into 2011, Twitter will be an especially important tool if you are trying to grow your business in any of the red “hot” states or a state with high growth rate.” So if you’re operating a business here in Mass. and getting started with Twitter, check out this post on how to drive traffic to your Boston business on Twitter. And if you’re interested in learning about other Twitter analytics tools, check out this post on the best Twitter analytics tools that incudes Twitter Grader and four others.
