I looked at the official Twitter streams for three similar-sized cities—Tampere, Espoo and Oulu—picking the most recent 120 tweets for each in the November to January timeframe. Here’s what each city’s Twitter profile tells me:
Tampere has 15,200 tweets, follows 164 accounts, and has 10,100 followers.
Espoo has 3,548 tweets, follows 377, and has 3,605 followers.
Oulu has 22,200 tweets, follows 121, and has 5,741 followers.
How the cities make use of Twitter is made clear by the fact that the samples contained very few discussion tweets: Tampere had 15, Espoo 11, and Oulu none. Another way to measure interactivity is through follow-ups and retweets. Tampere retweeted 35 times, Espoo 50, and Oulu once again had none. Building networks is apparently not a big deal for cities; so far the emphasis has been on the one-way distribution of newsletters, event announcements and job openings.