Glasgow has the chattiest people on Twitter in the UK, according to PeerIndex

Glaswegians have topped analysis by social analytics firm PeerIndex, as the UK’s most prolific tweeters.

The company has calculated town-tweet density looking at 148 million tweets sent in the last three months of 2012.

The tweets were geolocated and divided by the volume of each town as reported by the census. For Glasgow this meant more than 9.7 million tweets for a population of over 598 thousand people and put the city at the top of the chart.

During this period, 4.4 million tweets were analysed from Belfast which has 280,000 people according to the census. PeerIndex’s calculations brought Belfast in second.

Following Belfast; Liverpool, Cambridge, Oxford, London, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Newcastle rounded out the top ten in that order for tweet density.

In absolute numbers, London topped the charts. The densely populated capital drove between 60 and 70% of all tweets in the UK. According to PeerIndex, London is widely regarded to be one of the top cities in the world for Twitter use.

But through factoring in population, Glasgow was the chattiest. The Scottish city tweets  times more per head than Londoners.

Why so chatty in Glasgow? PeerIndex puts this down to the average age of people there. “Our hypothesis it’s Glasgow’s youthful population which drives its heavy Twitter usage. A full 40% of the city under the age of 30”, commented Azeem Azhar, founder of PeerIndex.

When it comes to the chattering classes online, it pays to look north in the UK for more conversation per person. Quite surprising given the media hub noise that is more usually associated with London.

Image Credit: Baaker2009 / Flickr