More and more German municipalities are using microblogging service Twitter.com – mainly as a complementary news outlet. A map provided by ifib (Institute for Information Management Bremen) displays more than 60 tweeting municipalities – Städte, Gemeinden & Kreise – in April 2011, highlighting total number of tweets and follower count. It looks like cities in the eastern federated states – except Berlin – don’t adopt the concept of microblogging and social networking by now. You can download location markers of german cities and mayors as KML (for Google Earth & Maps).
Source: ifib (CC BY)
Thanks for sharing this! Interesting question that pops up is: If you have max. 12,000 followers as a city (I assume that’s the number for Berlin?) are you still representative and reaching everyone you need? Did you do a content analysis of the tweets to see what they are tweeting about? Did they move from push to conversational style?
If you have under 12000 twitter followers as a city with nearly 3.5 mio inhabitants it’s plain to see that there is room for growth. I’m well aware that the hype phase is over but in Germany cities and government agencies just seem to get excited over the possibilities of Social Media. Municipalities are tweeting about opening hours, local events, school closures, traffic difficulties and citizen services (mainly one way). Some accounts experiment with @-replys, lists and direct messages (for instance @bremen_de, @hamburg_de or some personal accounts of mayors). What did you find out about US government agencies or cities on twitter or facebook? Any reading recommendations? BTW: We were surprised how easy is was to generate maps if coordinates (WGS84) are attached to plain text data. We need to push forward OpenData projects.