How many cities have adopted a Twitter account? 2007-2017
From 2007 to 2017, 439 of the 500 cities in our study started Twitter accounts. Of those, 36 were inactive in 2017. Most of the accounts are not regularly monitored and primarily use Twitter to post news and events.
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Obama's Memorandum on Transparency and Open government sparked an increase of Twitter adoption in 2009.
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Among the 439 cities that have Twitter accounts, some are active while others have stopped tweeting. This graph shows the birth, life, and death of Twitter accounts in this study. The blue dot shows a city opened an account. The red dot indicates the date of the last tweet. The earliest opened in 2007, while later adopters have been opening Twitter accounts as recently as 2017.
How many followers do cities have? 2017
The box plot above shows the mean, minimum, and maximum number of followers for the city Twitter accounts. We grouped the Twitter accounts by population size. Smaller cities, on average, have around 1500 followers, ranging from 0 to 3000. Larger cities average over 5000 followers.
How many accounts do cities follow? 2017
The box plot above shows the number of accounts that cities follow. The plots show the minimum, maximum, and average (gold line) of accounts that cities follow. Larger cities follow more accounts than smaller cities. Most of the cities in our study are not following one another on Twitter.