Sydneysiders like to tweet on company time

In order to better understand the truths behind the hype of social media, Sydney advertising agency The Works has today released the first ever map of the tweeting habits of Sydney, which highlights some remarkable truths about social media usage in Australia.

The agency’s research into the tweeting habits of Sydneysiders has produced some remarkable findings: Sydneysiders like to tweet on company time. When compared with other international cities, Sydney’s tweeting habits are quite different. They compared time of day for tweeting for Sydney, London, New York, Munich and Paris.

Sydneysiders tweet far more during work hours (weekdays 9-5pm) thanother cities and tweet less at home in the evening. This has importantcontextual implications for how we use Twitter for marketing, media andresearch purposes.

St Leonards and Bass Hill are amongst the top suburbs for frequenttweeting. A specially created map of Sydney with localized tweetingvolumes show that St Leonards, Bass Hill and Toongabbie are amongstSydney’s biggest tweeters. It appears that outer western suburbs ofSydney and St Leonards (the home of many advertising agencies) are thetwo faces of Twitter usage in Sydney. The study looked at tweets sent(rather than received), and showed that the vast majority of them werefor personal use.

This helps with understanding of the demographics of tweeting. The mapshows the peak usage suburbs as mountains, and low usage areas asvalleys.

Says Douglas Nicol, Partner at The Works: “Australians are addicted tosocial media – spending more hours per week on social media platformsthan any other Westernised country but yet we only starting tounderstand the changes it means for marketing.

“Our research on Twitter usage is a plea to marketers to stop usingsocial media as a marketing fashion accessory and invest inunderstanding the facts about social media in Australia and really lookat the opportunities in a no bullshit way.”

The research used a sample of more than 491,000 tweets over the courseof a typical week in Sydney. There are 455,000 Twitter accounts in NSW.

See the map online at www.TheWorksSydney.com