Category Archives: News

Presidential Campaign: Twitter Week in Review

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It’s been an interesting week on Twitter for the presidential candidates.  Mitt Romney is finally the last man standing in the GOP.  Barack Obama has ramped up his campaigning and attacks against Romney. Let’s look at the campaigns’ week on Twitter in review:

Click on Chart to See Full Size

What does it all mean? Let’s walk down the stats…

Barack Obama still has a commanding lead in followers and tweets over Romney — Mitt is going to need to renew his engagement with Social Media if he wants to compete.  He’s been relying on the masses (urged on by the GOP and others) who like to stomp over Obama’s hash tags (see my recent post on how effective that has or has not been).  But that’s all negative — it doesn’t make the case for Romney very effectively.

We can see that last week Romney’s efforts on twitter have been lackadaisical: he barely managed to get out more than a tweet a day.  That’s not engagement, that’s disengagement.  Did he give the social media team the week off?

Obama, on the other hand, is on fire.  He’s averaging over 20 tweets a day, and set off Twitter fireworks on Saturday with 80 tweets.  I wonder if he’ll keep it up.

And the response from the tweeple matches what the candidates have been doing.  Obama gets mentioned nearly 5 times as often as Romney does.  Twitter is an idea amplification device: no signal in equals no signal out.

You might wonder: maybe most of the tweets about Obama are negative? After all, the republicans have made a concerted effort to hijack Obama’s hash tags.  Sadly for the GOP, that’s not happening.  Only 20% of the tweets mentioning the President were critical of him.  On the other hand, Romney negatives are are almost double at 36%.  And those didn’t seem to be driven by an organized democratic campaign.

Of course, Romney and Obama are most frequently mentioned by each other’s followers.  There’s a lot of anti as well as pro out there. Young Jeezy was an interesting blip in mentions, owing to Obama’s prediction of his future singing…

So if last week wasn’t so good for Mitt, will he step up his Twitter output this week? Will the GOP increase its hashtag hijacking to grow Obama’s negatives? We’ll see in a week!  Be sure to subscribe to updates from this website — we only send out notification of new postings, so there’s no spamming to worry about.

Methodology:

Want to know how I came up with this data?

  • Tweets by candidates look only at the @BarackObama and @MittRomeny accounts.
  • Mentions look for tweets containing one or more of @BarackObama, #Obama2012, @MittRomney, or #Romney2012
  • Sentiment was calculated by taking a random sample of all tweets during the week mentioning either candidate.  Each tweet was scored, after I read it, as being in opposition of the candidate (anti-), not in opposition of the candidate (pro-), or not really about the candidate (off-topic) The sample size was 383 for Romney and 384 for Obama, and the percentages reported are + or – 5% at a 95% confidence level.  There is a level of subjectivity in my scoring, but for most tweets it’s pretty darn clear.
  • The list of top mentions is fairly simple to calculate.

Tools used were custom Java analysis programs, MySQL database.  Charts were generated in Excel and the entire document was assembled in Photoshop Elements 10. All on a Mac.

Sorry you read this far 🙂 ?

Did the Republicans hijack the Hashtag #DontDoubleMyRate ?

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You see a lot of comments on Twitter and elsewhere that the republicans managed to hijack the hash tag #DontDoubleMyRate to use to express opposition to Obama.  Usually, these comments come with a lot of glee that the conservatives have out-smarted the liberals.

So, did the hashtag get hijacked?

In a word, No.

There were 48578 tweets between 2012-04-18 11:04:19 and 2012-04-28 12:49:03 that used the hashtag.  Of those, only 14% or approximately 7,000 contained anti-Obama or just conservative messages.  There were probably as many spam messages!

The conservatives can say, all they want, that they managed to take over #DontDoubleMyRate, but the facts in this case, as Steven Colbert says, have a liberal bias.

Methodology:

A random sample of 376 tweets out of the total 48578 were selected programmatically and then read, by me, to be assessed as being either “conservative” or not. I was generous in my assessment, as some tweets are not terribly articulate.  54 of them were plausibly conservative.  54/376 = 14.36%    Thus, the estimated percentage of “conservative” tweets is 14.4% +/- 3.5% with a 95% confidence level.  At a 99% confidence level, the +/- is 4.6%.

War on Caterpillars? Is the RNC in Wonderland?

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There you are, working as the social media manager at a construction equipment manufacturer, and suddenly your name shows up all over the place on Twitter:

Caterpillar becomes a more popular term on Twitter

Click on chart to enlarge

Backhoe explode? Bad lawsuit?

Nope, the head of the Republican National Committee has compared women to caterpillars and presumably not the ones that run on diesel…

Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland

Sure, start a war on caterpillars because they smoke? That’s not very Republican…

Since not many caterpillars are on twitter, I think it’s safe to say that there’s a building anger among women (and gentlemen of honor) at the remark.

Both caterpillars and women can be forgiven for thinking they’ve landed in a bad republican wonderland.  Hmmmm … Santorum as the red queen?  Romney as the march hare? He does seem a bit like that, you’d have to admit.

 

Watching Twitter Watch the Melissa Harris-Perry Show

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[Note: Since this post was published, I’ve done a more recent analysis of The Melissa Harris-Perry Show’s Twitter engagement.  You can see it here]

One of the great additions to MSNBC’s line up is the Melissa Harris-Perry Show on weekend mornings, airing from 10am to noon Saturday and Sunday.  And one thing that makes it great is the way the MHP show has engaged its audience via Twitter, even going so far as to invent their own hashtag, #nerdland (One day I’ll find out if this is a pun on Birdland).

So while everyone was watching MHP, I was watching twitter … and as you’d expect, there was a spike in activity as the show was underway:

Twitter Activity during the Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC

Click to see larger chart

New tweets are in blue, and re-tweets are in red; over the course of the 48 hours of Saturday and Sunday, about 38% of the tweets were retweets.

You can clearly see the activity building up right before the start of the show, but quickly dwindling afterwards.  Since I included @mharrisperry references in my count, the residual activity is a combination of show related tweets and tweets to/from Melissa herself.

Re-tweets are a great way to find topics that are starting to resonate with the audience — a retweet is a vote up, and as retweets become popular it gives us all a sense of what the community thinks is interesting or important.  Here are the top 10 retweets over the weekend (with the number of retweets for each):

108 RT @MHPshow: #TrayvonMartin’s mother is now on Twitter. You can follow her at @SybrinaFulton.
47 RT @keithboykin: @MHPshow made a compelling point about Obama’s birth certificate & #Trayvon’s shooting. As blacks, we always have to prove we belong here.
47 RT @majorzman: White men in multi-$1000 suits brought this country to its knees. And we are afraid of young men in hoodies? #nerdland @MHPshow
41 RT @chrislhayes: If you’re watching @MHPShow and enjoying it, take a second to send an email or text or FB message to someone else you know who would like it
39 RT @MHarrisPerry: This morning @MHPShow takes on serious issues of Affordable Care Act, GOP race & Trayvon Martin. On lighter side- Mad Men. #nerdland 10AM ET
36 RT @MHPshow: Melissa’s conversation today with three young men about what it’s like to grow up black in America right now: http://t.co/WNy9Dw64 #nerdland
33 RT @MHPshow: James Baldwin was just quoted on the show. Here is the author being interviewed in Miami about race in 1963: http://t.co/neH8KrnD #nerdland
30 RT @MHPshow: Now in #nerdland: Melissa talks to three black young men about growing up in today’s America. They’re joined by Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu.
29 RT @MHPshow: “White folks are sometimes looking for the slur; this is a pattern of institutional neglect,” said @timjacobwise. #TrayvonMartin #nerdland
29 RT @MHPshow: “It’s always on the side of people of color to fix something,” @AntheaButler said. #TrayvonMartin #nerdland

It’s interesting that so many of the retweets are from the show itself.  But it is also interesting that these tweets represent a small fraction of the roughly 2500 retweets that took place — so it’s clear that no avalanche took place (for an example of a retweet avalanche, see my article on when the Trayvon Martin story caught fire on Twitter).

Not surprisingly, the show was the most frequently mentioned twitter id in the tweets:

Viewers are clearly very engaged with what’s going on in the show.  Similarly for hashtag usage:

Hashtags used during the MHP show

Click for larger version

Almost everyone managed to include the #nerdland tag.

What I find most insightful, however, is the list of most frequently used words in the tweets (with stop words — the, and, etc. — removed).  This really gives you a flavor of the discussion going on:

I picked the top 30 words, but clearly the list goes on from there.  If you hadn’t seen any of the show, you could guess by looking at Twitter that the topics included something about “young black men”…

So what to make of all this? First, there’s a vibrant community of Twitter users who engage during the MHP Show, even if they disperse back to other Twitter communities when the show is not on.  Second, the community is carrying on an extended conversation about the topics being discussed.  Since the show itself is a discussion the majority of the time, it’s like an inner circle of conversation on the show and an outer circle of the same conversation on Twitter.  It would be an interesting dynamic to have a mixing of the conversations between those two circles as the show goes on….

I’ll try to come back to the MHP show in a few months and compare the Twitter communities to get a sense of the growth and change that has taken place.

Methology:

I used all Tweets from 00:00 am Saturday until 11:59 pm Sunday that had either @mhpshow, #nerdland, or @mharrisperry in the tweet. 

Twitter reacts to the Trayvon Martin shooting

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Trayvon Martin’s shooting in central Florida has generated a great deal of anger and protest, with a huge protest rally taking place in Sanford, FL yesterday.  And the protest has taken place on Twitter as well, with huge volumes of tweets being sent and resent.

Looking at yesterday, we can see that nearly 200,000 tweets were sent on the topic.  Here’s a graph of the volume of tweets during the day (you can click on any of these charts to see larger versions):

Tweets during the day of 3/20 on the topic of Trayvon Martin

What’s interesting is the explosion of re-tweets towards the end of the day.  This is like an avalanche picking up speed — the initial bolders dislodge other bolders, until the side of the mountain is slipping down to the valley.

We can get a sense of who’s being retweeted by looking at the list of people mentioned in the tweets, the user in the RT @user:

User PrettyBoyJake made one tweet, at 5:18 pm, which said “R.I.P. To The Young 17 Year Old Boy Trayvon Martin From Florida Who Was Shot & Killed By A Racist Neighborhood Watchman #RT To Show Respect” and got nearly 6000 retweets.

At 9:13pm, user _MacKISSES tweeted “R.I.P. Trayvon retweet to show respect ! http://t.co/p9w4zJ7c” — and that tweet caused the spike we see during the 21:00 (9pm) and 22:00 (10pm) hours with over 8000 retweets.

The right message at the right time can generate a huge response on twitter!

There were a couple of hashtags that stood out:

I think the “#rt” hashtag is interesting — it’s asking people to retweet.

Finally, a look at the top 50 words used across all the tweets (“stop” words  — the, and, etc. — not included):

It’s not surprising that “Trayvon” is at the top, FYI, as that was a search term used to identify the tweets — every tweet analyzed used that word. (Click on the chart to see a larger version).

All told, I analyzed 181,622 tweets that had been sent yesterday, 3/20, between midnight and midnight, EDT.  The volume is impressive, and the 61% or so that were retweets (I was fairly strict in defining what is a retweet) show that retweets are a powerful way of demonstrating support for a topic, somewhat akin to the “Like” button in Facebook or signing a petition at Change.org.