Weekly Dose of Data Analyst#5 — What time does Trump’s tweets attracts the most attention ?
Continuing from last week’s post, I am also curious of what time does Trump’s tweet attract most attention from his followers.
To do that, I will use twitter’s engagement matrix formula to measure how engaged his follower is for each of his tweet.
Notice, in current Trump’s tweet database, there is no recording of the number of replies, so it will be replaced by the number of likes.
To represent each hour of the day fairly, the median value of engagement rate of the tweets in an hour will be chosen to represent that hour. In addition, if there is an hour which Trump does not sent out more than ten tweets, these tweets in that hour will not be taken into consideration.
Summary
Overall, Trump’s tweet gets most of the attention in following time of the day :
- Noon of the day
- Early Morning (12 AM and 1 AM) and Afternoon (1PM to 8 PM) of weekends
- Evening of weekdays (around 10 PM)
His tweets on Saturday and Sunday afternoon are more efficient in terms of getting people engaged considering that overall he did not send out many tweets during these times (Please see that in WDDA#4).
Interestingly, this heat map’s pattern is similar to an average people’s leisure time pattern in the east coast of America. They work in morning and afternoon during weekdays while have time to look at twitter at noon and before sleep. They slept late over weekends and have time to look at twitter and engage with president in the late morning and afternoon.
Similar to my last post (WDDA #4), I have separated this heat map into different period. And it will be discussed in the next section.
Detail
Similar to last post, I have separated his time on twitter into four period (The dates have been tweaked a little, due to that the number of followers data does not cover all dates)
- Before 2016 presidential campaign (June 12th 2014 to June 15th 2015)
- During 2016 presidential campaign(June 16th 2015 to November 9th 2016)
- During his presidency (January 20th 2017 to June 17th 2019)
- During 2020 presidential campaign (June 18th 2019 to May 8th 2020)
Tweets engagement matrix heat map before Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign
During pre 2016 presidential campaign, his tweets does not have lots of engagement from his followers. Even during Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 8PM when he sent out most of his tweets, there is no clear sign of increasing in the engagement rate except Tuesday 8 PM.
Tweets engagement matrix heat map during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign
Again during 2016 presidential campaign, there is no clear engagement rate increase when he sent out most of his tweets which are Monday to Thursday early morning except Thursday 1 AM.
Tweets engagement matrix heat map during Trump’s presidency
During his presidency, the median engagement rate for all tweets have increased quite a bit. Usually the high engagement time comes from when he sent out most of his tweets which are noon time of weekdays and weekends.
Tweets engagement matrix heat map during Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign
During his 2020 presidential campaign, his tweets get more engagement in the afternoon compare to the morning. His tweets on Monday and Thursday afternoon, Sunday and Wednesday evening get comparatively high tweet engagement rate, even though he did not send out many tweets during the same period.
Again, I have prepared a heat map with a date filter. So whoever is interested can have a look at it.
Please click the link here to access my Tableau workbook.
Data Source:
All Trump’s tweets data are downloaded from Trump Twitter Archive. You can check their website by click here.
History of Trump’s number of followers on twitter can be seen by click here.
