With some huge statistics ranging from 80 million visits per day (reported by ComScore) and 190 million visits (reported by twitter) and more than 110+ million users, there are no clear statistics if any about the activity, stats or number of twitter users from Egypt or even the number of Egyptian tweets.

A world of tweets is a a twitter heat map developed based on sampling from Twitter API, according to the geographical area. So i tried to monitor Egypt, at a time that is expected to be a high peak, it’s 8:45 PM, and Egypt has just beaten Australia 3:0, so i guess many people would like to tweet about the big win of Egyptian national team and the goals of Zidan and Gedo!

I kept the page open for 10 minutes and i was surprised that there was no activity on Egypt area, even though there is activity in some gulf and middle east countries (i wouldn’t say MENA region, since there is no activity in North Africa) like Saudi Arabia and UAE, some African countries like Nigeria, South Africa and Even Liberia!

Twitter heat map just after Egypt Match – No activity in Egypt

3 minutes later i was able to barely spot Egypt, with very little traffic apparently.

Twitter Activity 3 minutes later – Egypt can be seen

Twitter in Egypt is not yet a big thing, i am not saying it is not magnificent, it is indeed a mean of communication used by the blogger and activists, some politician and some major companies and brands in Egypt. However, it has not reached the point where you would find3 or 4 of your 300 or 400 Facebook friends have an account on twitter.

Well, that make my estimate, twitter has 1/100 or less of the number of users Facebook has, Facebook has in Egypt about 4 million users, that makes roughly 40,000 twitter users, …. wonder how of them are active and how much created a twitter account and said: “This is my first tweet” or said something like “I am having Pizza for lunch” and then never used their account again because they didn’t get the idea of it.

Let’s wait and see how things go, but i don’t think twitter in Egypt is taking off any soon. Though i am very proud of the 1,250 twitter follower that Egypt Yellow Pages have today. Putting in mind that our activity is relatively low on twitter, sending tweets a couple of times a week.

Egypt Yellow Pages Twitter Followers

That said, all respects goes to the the active twitter user base who where able to do positive changes, like the pressure that was done on Vodafone Egypt to remove their Abbas Ibn Fernas Ad, which was removed from Vodafone Egypt Official YouTube channel recently. If you want to read more about this topic just login to twitter and search for #VodaFly.

Do you think my estimates are accurate? More or less than the reality? Do you have the real numbers for twitter number of users in Egypt? if you do please share your opinion here.

Update:

One more argument that supports my estimate, is that Vodafone Egypt has about 467,000 fans on Facebook opposed to 6,139 on Twitter (who remained after the #VodaFly incident of course), 1/76, close to my estimate. probably the number of twitter users in Egypt is  50,000 users after all.

Also found a very interesting related article, they assumed that the number of twitter users in Egypt is 2,000 which is wrong,  Vodafone Egypt has more than 6,139 followers!… Here is the part i liked:

However, in Egypt Twitter seems not to have caught on, something that can be explained by an understanding of the special nature of network markets, as discussed in Economics by MIT and Yale professors Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus. In their book, the authors argue that “consumers derive benefits not simply from their own use of a good in a network market, but also from the number of other consumers who adopt the good,” known in economics as “adoption externality”.

Read this article from Al Ahram Weekly