Company References in Tweets

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009

This is a second installment in a series analyzing aspects of a years worth of tweets containing the word 'apple'. The previous post showed which Apple brands were referenced the most and their distribution over time. This one focuses on the other companies mentioned in tweets containing 'apple'. The data is from Sep 1st, 2008 until Aug 31, 2009 and I collected a total of 2,852,320 tweets in this time frame and analyzed every fifth tweet emitted (570,464 of them) to get the results below.

Apart from Apple itself, the most frequently mentioned company in the data was Google followed closely by Microsoft. The spread over time is very spiky for all the companies but some exhibit very little attention apart from the spikes - Dell, Adobe, and Facebook for example. Verizon shows a significant drop off in attention over this time span and both AT&T and Palm have become discussed more often over time. As in my previous post these distribution graphs have been normalized using the number of tweets in each time period to remove the overall trend of increasing twitter use from the picture. They are also scaled independently in the vertical direction in order to show the most detail for each graph.

I've created accentuated word clouds that show the words used in conjunction with the various companies to give some idea of what was being discussed in relation to Apple and the respective company. In an accentuated word cloud the sizes of the words are a function of both the frequency with which they occur and their prominence relative to a baseline text.


 


Apple Brand References in Tweets
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Simplistic Sentiment Mining from Tweets