Tracking Self-Reg via #onemilliontweetmap

Doug Peterson posted a fun new interactive tool on his blog this morning: #onemilliontweetmap. The One Million Tweet Map is pretty self explanatory - it plots tweets in real time on a map of the world.

But where it gets interesting is when you start to explore some of the features. For example, you can track tweets in real time using a hashtag. I decided to track #selfreg to see where people were located who were tweeting about this topic.

Self-reg is truly a worldwide phenomenon as you can see by this map, which I took as a screenshot at just over 100,000 tweets.  While much of the activity was centred in North America, there was also activity in South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. There's even someone tweeting about self-reg in Iceland!

There are some caveats with a twitter map. Not everyone is on twitter. The Pew Research Centre estimates that about 19% of American adults aged 18+ use Twitter, and that Twitter users are more likely to be college educated and under 50 years old.

from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/demographics-of-key-social-networking-platforms-2/

But #onemilliontweetmap does give us an indication for the global spread interest of a topic.  Try searching #worldcup2018!