This past cycle, we took a stab at collecting all the Twitter handles for cities and counties in ShortStack, our knowledge base of local governments. Out of 1293 accounts across 810 cities and counties (that we found), here’s the top ten by followers:
- @311NYC
Followers: 12958 Number of Posts: 1435
311 is your source for New York City government services. Account not monitored 24 hours. - @SeattlePD
Followers: 8516 Number of Posts: 1298
News/events from Seattle Police. - @CityMinneapolis
Followers: 8490 Number of Posts: 8490
News and updates from the City of Minneapolis - @MiamiBeachNews
Followers: 6962 Number of Posts: 820
Official Tweet of the City of Miami Beach Government - @PhiladelphiaGov
Followers: 5971 Number of Posts: 1741
The Government of the City/County of Philadelphia - @cityofokc
Followers: 5353 Number of Posts: 603
Oklahoma City tweets. - @MinneapolisSnow
Followers: 5124 Number of Posts: 113
Snow Emergency updates from the City of Minneapolis - @bouldercolorado
Followers: 4841 Number of Posts: 2306
Boulder sits 5,430 feet above sea level and is surrounded by a greenbelt of city trails and open spaces. - @RichmondPolice
Followers: 4370 Number of Posts: 3275
News and Updates From the Richmond Virginia Police Department. - @OkCountySheriff
Followers: 4004 Number of Posts: 1179
Official Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office Twitter Page.
No surprise that our most populous city, NYC, takes the top spot on the Twitter rankings. But I often think of San Francisco, Chicago and DC as leaders of the Gov 2.0 space. So, its definitely fun to see Oklahoma City and Minneapolis take two of the top ten spots! Two of our 2011 cities, Philadelphia and Seattle also represent. Some of our fellows will be diving into these numbers and researching the cities to understand their success; check back soon for their findings.
To get the list, we wrote some scripts (available in our github repo) using Google search and our growing database of city and county websites (about 8800 so far). If we couldn’t find a link to a twitter account from the city or county website, we probably didn’t find it (and most likely, neither did its citizens). We’re building towards trending data across all Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other sorts of interesting streams. We’ll report back with more in the next month and make the data public. If you’d like a copy of the data, let us know.
