Twitter is in for news recently for data center crashes and millions of fake accounts. Certainly it is not something good to hear about such a popular social media channel. However, Twitter is doing many other things on the other side which certainly deserves appreciation. Today, let us look at one of their recently introduced feature, Twitter Political Index.
The Setting to Political Index
Which would be a perfect political setting to come with such a tool? Got it right! It is the US presidential elections 2012, which is also called by some social media experts as the ‘Twitter Election’. You can just imagine the depth of coverage of this political event in Twitter from one of the comments made by US Government’s social media official. According to him there are more Twitters being sent on this Election 2012 every 2 days than the total number of messages delivered on the election prior to 2008. The wide use of Twitter by both Presidential candidates, Mr. Barack Obama and Mr. Mitt Romney is one factor that has contributed to this huge tide of tweets over the last few months.
What is Twitter Political Index?
The concept is simple, but powerful. With Twitter getting so popular, people are used to express their instant reaction to any incident happening around them by tweeting. Twitter is leveraging this behavior of Twitter followers to index sentiments expressed by millions of users towards both presidential candidates on every day by going through millions of tweets on the topic. This is the first time sentiments of people can be measured accurately as there is a common platform for people to express their thoughts and views. Earlier this kind of discussion would be happening in scattered form, across coffee tables, informal chats in a train and so on, which is hard to track and measure.
Who is computing it? How to interpret it?
Twitter brought in behavior experts and data analysts from Topsy, an online traffic tracker, as well as political analysts firms like The Mellman Group and North Star Opinion Research to do a daily analysis of these millions of tweets and prepare the index tool. The Index is an absolute percentage of the degree of positive sentiment expressed by people in their tweets. If the Index tool shows a score of 45 for a candidate, that means, on an average 45% people have expressed positive sentiments in tweets. If the percentage is lower, then sentiments expressed are more on the negative side. It is easy to drill down and assess the sentiments across factors like sex, region etc. isint this simple? But it makes lot of sense.
This tool has the potential..
Now I believe that this tool can potentially become a true real-time monitor for capturing and measuring sentiments of people to anything – be it from political events, government policies or new product launches. However, we still need to go deep into understanding how the sentiment analysis is computed and represented.
