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Sentiment Analysis - Trump vs Obama

9/1/2017

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Sentiment analysis is still an emerging concept that is far from fully refined. It takes in strings of text and evaluates word by word to discover the overall sentiment and subjectivity. 
Due to the nature of human language there are obvious fail points, especially considering sarcasm. At an individual level it could give the sentence "No, I'm not willing to die yet" a very negative score (due to the words no, not and die) when it may be the opposite. 

But, on an aggregate level, it's not too bad. The occasional miss calculations usually become anomalies in the grand scheme. 
Below is a look at the last 3200 tweets written by former US President Obama and current US President Trump. I've run these against sentiment analysis and the results - as well as how their users interact with them - is interesting.  Also, to order your own twitter sentiment analysis - See our new products page

First let's look at total counts by sentiment and subjectivity
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First interesting thing is that in the last 3200 tweets, Obama has never written directly to a user - anyone holding out hope for a reply should bury that dream. 
Sensitivity: Obama has 3% of all personal tweets as showing a negative sentiment. Trump comes in higher at 11%, having twice as many negative tweets over a smaller sum. Also of interest is that Trump overall is more positive than Obama as well. Overall, Trump shows far more emotion in his tweeting with 42% of tweets registering an emotion compared to Obama's 31%.

Subjectivity: Obama registers half his tweets as objective, with Neutral being the next highest and only sending a subjective tweet 19% of the time. Trump is a bit more spread out in his objectivity, but he does tweet subjectively less than he does Neutral and Objective. 

But where it really gets interesting is how followers react to each tweet category. 
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Sentiment: Obama's very small negative bucket registers the best, which is surprising. If you consider the president's role, these tweet's are typically denouncements or condemnations. His Neutral and Positive tweets do about the same. 
Trump's followers don't go for the neutral tweets. Both the positive and negative tweets do way better. His twitter blows up when he shows emotion, which potentially explains why we see so much of it. 

Subjectivity: Obama's twitter base go for don't touch his neutral tweets. They, seemingly, like the facts or an opinion, but nothing that flaunts the line. And it's significant, on average when he is down the middle, he gets 2K less retweets per post.
For Trump, similar to his sentiment, people love his subjectivity. "He tells it like it is" well that's because it gets results. He averages an extra four thousand retweets more when he's subjective vs objective. 

To see how the full charts look, or to get one for you or your company register, click here
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