Hashtag Wars: #ThingsConservativesHate

Another week, another hashtag war: who will dominate #ThingsConservativesHate — Conservatives or their detractors?

Based upon a random sample of 370 tweets out of about 10,000 captured since 1/12/2013, the breakdown is:

Percentage Type
56% Anti-Conservative
29% Pro-Conservative
15% Indecipherable

This # of samples gives us 95% confidence of being +/- 5% of these values.

Before we celebrate the triumph of liberalism, however, it’s worth knowing that #thingsliberalshate has gotten about twice as many tweets in roughly the same time…

Obama vs. Romney on Twitter — Ryan VP Pick week (8/12/2012)

With all of the excitement over Todd Akin, it’s easy to forget that last week was all about Romney picking Paul Ryan as his running mate.  But it was a busy week nonetheless, and it’s interesting to look at how it was played out on Twitter.

The first thing that stands out is that the number of tweets mentioning each candidate was roughly the same.  Both received about 1.9 million mentions on Twitter.  Romney may have fewer followers, but he’s just as hot of a topic.

For both of the candidates, about 45% of the tweets were retweets, while the rest were not (or were modified in the process).  There’s a lot of people expressing their opinions out there.  And what were those opinions?

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The battle of #RepublicanMovies vs. #DemocratMovies

Nothing] brings together the diverse communities on Twitter like a good ol’ fashion brawl.  This weekend’s event was the battle of the #RepublicanMovies hashtag vs. the #DemocratMovies tag.

In case you missed this event, the idea was to come up with variations of movie names that humorously slight the other party.  So tweets with #RepublicanMovies are coming from democrats, and vice versa for #DemocratMovies.

Here are two samples:

The last one is, in fact, the very first #RepublicanMovies tweet that I have found and appears to have started the genre!

Since the meme started with the democrats, and the republicans quickly joined in, who “won” the battle of the movie tweets?  Here’s a recap of the action:

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Not a good weekend for the Republicans!  Better luck next meme …

Connie Mack has a burst of enthusiasm! Florida Senate Race on Twitter 4/29-5/5/2012

Republican primary frontrunner Connie Mack IV had a burst of Twitter activity this week, giving us a nice spike in activity.  He had a day of tweets on Thursday, and throughout the week his mentions on Twitter were higher than his two primary opponents and his (should he win the primary) general election opponent, Senator Bill Nelson.

 

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Mike McCalister has all but disappeared from Twitter, which seems to match the odds he’s getting for winning the primary…

Presidential Campaign: Twitter Week in Review

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 🙂 ?