The Balearic Government is using thousands of Twitter accounts to keep tabs on the floating population.
The study concludes that the Balearic Islands receives the most foreigners in high season, Cantabria is second and there is a huge difference between them and other communities.
The Government believes that twitter could be the definitive tool for financing the Islands and has promoted a study on the use of Twitter throughout Spain to calculate the population in each autonomy.
The study anonymously analyses thousands of Twitter accounts: starting with where the account is usually used – the community or country of origin of the user and conducts a physical follow-up of the account, to determine where the tweets originate.
The study was carried out by José Javier Ramasco and Miguel Artigues, from the Institute of Interdisciplinary Physics and Complex Systems, a research institute jointly owned by the UIB and the Higher Council for Scientific Research, or CSIC.
Ramasco explains that this data has been used to track the flow of movements via social networks and acknowledges that Twitter is used by 1% of the total population, who are young, urban groups who move around a lot. For the first time results can be compared with other Autonomous Communities.
In the Balearic Islands, for example, the Human Pressure Index makes it possible to know exactly how many people there are on the Islands at any specific time, but that data did not exist until now in other autonomous communities.
The Government has delivered its report to the Ministry of Finance to show that there are tools available to calculate the floating population of each community and wants to include this factor in the new financing model.
"It is very important that the financing system includes this as a first indicator," explains the General Director of Finance, Xisco Oliver. "It is the first step in being able to quantify this phenomenon and compare it with other communities."
The report concludes that the Balearic Islands suffers the greatest human pressure in the country during high season.
The results also confirm that the Balearic Islands is a very special case because of its high floating population in relation to the resident population and because of the marked seasonality of the floating population.
Human pressure increases by 50% in the Balearic Islands in summer season and it also has one of the highest percentage of visitors in low season, surpassed by Madrid and Aragon.
The Government has proven that the communities where the population grows more,are those that generate employment, such as the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands and Madrid.