First State of the Belgian Twitosphere

The community of Belgians in the Twitter universe counts at least 308 accounts. I was able to identify these 308 Twitter accounts using a combined approach consisting of looking at markers appearing on TwitterMap, performing searches using TwitterSearch or Twitterment or even good old Google. Another useful source is following the friends of already identified Twitters from Belgium.

Phases
For the Belgian Twitter accounts open to everyone, I checked the date of the first update. This allowed me to create a graph, showing 4 distinct phases in the growth of the Belgian Twitosphere.

First phase : very early adopters - from August 22, 2006 until October 29, 2006 - 6 accounts.
Second phase : first accelaration - from November 11, 2006 until November 29, 2006 - 18 accounts.
Third phase : stable growth - from December 10, 2006 until March 9, 2007.
Fourth phase : accelarated growth - from March 10, 2007 until now.

I already published a first version of this graph on my blog in Dutch (bvlg.be) almost a month ago. The accelarated growth from March 2007 seems to continue. There is not yet a tipping point in sight.



Public of Private
70 Belgians or 22% have chosen the keep their updates only available to their friends. Most of them have probably read the blogpost of Peter Forret regarding the indexing of Twitter pages.

Deleted accounts
9 accounts or 3% are not available anymore. The owners of these accounts have chosen for whatever reason to stop twittering and to delete their accounts.

Number of friends
13% of the accounts have no Twitter friends at all. On the other hand Veerle Pieters has currently 98 friends. An average Twitter account from Belgium has 9,6 friends (which leads me to the next question - where can you find a 0,6 friend ?).



Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as friends and therefore receives all updates. 12% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as a friend. Veerle Pieters has the highest number of followers (535). An average Twitter account from Belgium had 10,5 followers.



Updates
The Twitter account from Belgium with most updates is Andrea Guerra - who is twittering in Spanish. At the moment of this writing, this account has 778 updates. 4% of the Belgian accounts (deleted accounts not included) are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average average Twitter account from Belgium has 72 updates.



Degree of activity
12% of all Twitter accounts from Belgium with a public feed did not post an update in the last 20 days. These account can perhaps be considered as "almost dead" accounts. 74% of all Twitter accounts from Belgium with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive and kicking.