Twitter for Business and Government and number of Australians

In this video taken at the Mayor of San Francisco’s press conference, @ev (Evan Williams, CEO and co-founder of Twitter) is talking about how businesses use Twitter… and government departments

Some of his examples and points:

• Events – Earthquakes creates viral spike in activity
• Public Transit – BART light rail (?) gives updates on Twitter (like the lovely MelbTransport 🙂 ) But official. Interestingly, BART has Twitter on their webpage so @ev agrees that BART are advertising Twitter.
• Meeting diaires
• Retail local business is interesting to @ev – they don’t use online a lot usually. Mission Pie talks about new pies. Increase in pie business 10-20% since Twittering. Lots of beer on Twitter too. 😛
• Arts, Attractions – Museum, Zoo, Symphony, Parks –  Zoo promotes Twitter on their home page. 

… actually I’ve asked them for their powerpoint preso (hard to see in the video) so I’ll edit more later. if I get access to it. 

We were number 12 on the list – 3% – a year ago for web traffic. 

I’ve posted Twitter usage for Australia Australia Statistics and Ev talks about Australia on Twitter blog. Last year we were number 12 country for web traffic and #6 for SMS (now stopped due to our greedy telcos). 

Sometimes I get the feeling that Twitter are trying to do everything themselves, with regards to selling Twitter as a business proposition: consider this Tweet (from me) about Facebook:

@ariherzog Facebook: 280 million members, 175 million access monthly, 18 million update status daily, 4 million become Fans of Pages daily.

That’s the sort of statistics that make it easy for us to sell Twitter as a business marketing tool. Facebook has 4.6 million Australians out of a population of 21.5 million on active accounts. I can’t easily get those figures for Twitter. But I know that Australia is consistently 3% of traffic for most Twitter applications  (from @dacort) – but what is the overall global Twitter account number? Consensus seems to be around 6 million accounts (50 million visits per month). Anyone got a calculator? 😛  Oh wait Google -3 % of 6 million = 180,000 Australians on Twitter. Lucas Ng came up with a little more:  250k. 

Ok, I’m off to run another workshop here in Singapore. Just quick posts at the moment, teaching takes a lot of the energies used for blogging, I find.