How local is Twitter?

Abstract

This study is an initial attempt to investigate the reach of Twitter depending on the original location of tweets. The major objective is to measure how local or global Twitter's reach is and how localized cities compare to big cosmopolitans cities. Using a custom data scrapper, this analysis contains data on tweets emitted from 12 U.S. cities as well as the associated retweets. Retweets were mapped to a location and the distance from their point of origin and analyzed to better understand the reach by city. The analysis offers a description of a method to capture such data, the exploration of potential patterns and an attempt to correlate the reach of big cities to specific factors. On the basis of the results of this analysis, it appears that despite Twitter being considered a global network empowering people for broader communication, small cities have almost no international reach. Twitter appears to be first and foremost a local network, and only cosmopolitan cities seem to have a reach beyond their local sphere.