Independent coffee shops opening over the past few years are beginning to report healthy survival rates.  The latest of the speciality coffee stores to celebrate two years in business is the Urban Coffee Company of Birmingham, which has thrown a party for regular customers.

Urban’s Hannah Wolsey has said that over the last year, the company has sold 1,456,000 grammes of espresso, which is the weight of a small car, and took the company to a turnover of £300,000. With the opening of a second site, Urban is looking to hit £500,000 for 2011.

Urban Coffee is notable for embracing the social media phenomenon, and the company’s Simon Jenner has recently researched how many followers certain cafés have on Twitter.

His own business has 2,413 followers, closely followed by Kaffeine of London and North Tea Power of Manchester.  Dose and Nude of London, and Coffee#1 of Wales both have well over 1,500 followers, and Prufrock in London has over a thousand. This compares with one and a half million for Starbucks, but more tellingly, 2,903 followers for Costa.  The conclusion, it appears, is that independents generally use social media more and better than the giants, but even so, Simon is surprised at the number of coffee-houses who do not appear onTwitter at all.