Twitter Analytics

Twitter is one of the most powerful communication tools ever created. There are over 1.3 billion registered Twitter users (Smith, 2016). 100 million daily people actively use Twitter every day. 6,000 tweets are tweeted every second. Communication has never been so abundant, public, and chronicled. Not only is there a gigantic population to market to, but also a wealth of information about that population to record and draw insights from. However, many companies' Twitter accounts fail to generate popular posts on a regular basis. The content that they produce is ineffective and uninteresting. In my opinion, these companies are failing to take advantage of a huge opportunity. I decided to dive into the Twitter accounts of some of my favorite companies to see what they were doing wrong and how they could improve. My thesis investigates 18 different company Twitter accounts from four different industries: Athletic Apparel, Technology, Online Entertainment, and Car Manufacturing. I pulled 200 tweets from each company and cleaned and organized the data into an Excel spreadsheet. I investigated how certain variables impacted tweet popularity across the four industries. First, I looked at tweet format to determine whether posts, retweets, or replies were the best format. Then, I analyzed how different elements of a tweet's content could impact the tweet's popularity. Specifically, I looked at the effects of including links, hashtags, and questions into the tweet. Next, I tried to determine the optimal tweet length for each industry. And finally, I compared each industry's tweet sentiment preferences. I then summarized my findings into a series of recommendations for companies to improve their tweet popularity.