New “Twitter Political Index” Ranks Opinion Of Presidential Candidates Based On Tweets

Who’s ahead in popular opinion in the US presidential race? Plenty of third-parties have tried to measure this in the past using tweets. Now Twitter is doing the interpretation directly through its just-launched Twitter Political Index. Twitter blogged about the new service today, saying that it’s based on analyzing two million tweets per week and […]

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The Twitter Political Index

Who’s ahead in popular opinion in the US presidential race? Plenty of third-parties have tried to measure this in the past using tweets. Now Twitter is doing the interpretation directly through its just-launched Twitter Political Index.

Twitter blogged about the new service today, saying that it’s based on analyzing two million tweets per week and built in conjunction with the data analysis team at Topsy and two polling firms, The Mellman Group and North Star Opinion Research.

The index is updated each day (after 8pm Eastern Time) and tries to evaluate the “sentiment” expressed in tweets about each candidate.

Right now (well, for July 31), President Barack Obama has dipped four points to a score of 34 since the previous day, while Republican candidate Mitt Romney is up by two points. But with an overall score of 25, Romney still trails Obama.

The index also maintains a trend over time, so you can see how opinion of each candidate has gained or dropped. It stretches back to May 1:

The Twitter Political Index 1

Sentiment analysis can be tough. It’s easy to misinterpret what seems to be a favorable opinion that’s actually a negative one (sarcastic tweets, for example). But Twitter says that its new index compares well to traditional polls like those run by Gallup, offering up this two year comparison:

Twindex Chart 2yr 30d

In general, the trend lines align. When they don’t, Twitter says it may be capturing “nuances” that traditional polls may miss:

The trend in Twitter Political Index scores for President Obama over the last two years often parallel his approval ratings from Gallup, frequently even hinting at where the poll numbers are headed.

But what’s more interesting are the periods when these data sets do not align, like when his daily scores following the raid that killed Osama bin Laden dropped off more quickly than his poll numbers, as the Twitter conversation returned to being more focused on economic issues.

By illustrating instances when unprompted, natural conversation deviates from responses to specific survey questions, the Twitter Political Index helps capture the nuances of public opinion.

Topsy is also maintaining its own version of the index (but without the overall trend line), and USA Today has one based on Twitter’s data.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land, MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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