Here’s a quick analysis of how Mitt Romney is doing in Social Media. I looked at all tweets that mentioned him in a 24-hour period and analyzed the sentiment of the tweet. I then looked at how often Romney was mentioned with other candidates or topics and looked at how that affected his score.
Here’s the results:
Romney + | Average Sentiment | # Tweets | % Tweets |
+ Ron Paul | 3.38 | 1256 | 4.4% |
+ Santorum | 2.05 | 7629 | 26.9% |
+ Health | 1.59 | 455 | 1.6% |
All Tweets | 1.06 | 28413 | 100.0% |
+ Obamacare | 0.87 | 271 | 1.0% |
+ Gingrich | 0.62 | 3570 | 12.6% |
+ Tax | 0.18 | 316 | 1.1% |
+ Obama | 0.06 | 1859 | 6.5% |
+ Limbaugh | -0.49 | 115 | 0.4% |
+ Romneycare | -0.61 | 61 | 0.2% |
What’s really interesting is that Santorum is mentioned in over a quarter of the tweets that mention Romney, while New only shows up in less than an eighth. The twitterverse is validating that Mitt’s main challenger is Santorum.
We can also see that when Rush Limbaugh and Romneycare are mentioned, the tweets swing to the negative. Fortunately, there are very few tweets on the subject, and so Mitt can probably rest comfortable that these will not be big issues for him.
Sentiment measures the “feeling” of the tweet, with positive numbers represent happy emotions and negative numbers representing negative emotions. It is a crude measurement, although when averaged over a large number of tweets it becomes insightful.