Ohio State University vs. Michigan State University Tweets

The Michigan State Spartans will be playing the Ohio State Buckeyes in Columbus, Ohio on October 5, 2019. I would like to analyze tweets mentioning these schools by either their Twitter handle or hashtag listed on the official football Twitter pages as #GoGreen (MSU) or #GoBucks (OSU).

Question 1: What University is mentioned most in tweets leading up to the game and the day after?

Collection Method:

Initially, I found it a little surprising that Michigan State (412k) had more followers than Ohio State (327k). I am going to search tweets during the available time frames allowed by the Twitter API and search by Twitter handle or “official hashtag”, excluding retweets.

Collection Data:

Collection Analysis:

The analysis shows that the Ohio State University received an overwhelmingly larger amount of mentions than Michigan State, by a margin of 30,050 to 9,994. After reviewing this information, I wanted to see how many of these tweets came from followers.

Question 2: What University is mentioned most in tweets from followers of either school leading up to the game and the day after?

Collection Method:

I am going to download all of the user ids for followers of both schools and combine them into one data frame. I am going to combine the previous tweets downloaded from both schools into one table. In order to find out followers tweeting I will include only those tweets whose user id is also in the combined followers table.

Collection Data:

Collection Analysis:

The analysis shows that the tweets follow a similar trend to all tweets regardless of the source of mention. To further display this the chart below shows that roughly half of all Tweets are coming from followers. I expected the percentage to be higher in favor of followers.

Question 3: Where are the tweets coming from

Collection Method:

I am going to map out where the tweets are coming from in the country.

Collection Data:

Collection Analysis:

The plot seems to be as I would expect, it is worth mentioning that the green dots surrounding Columbus may be due to the game taking place at Ohio State University.