Twitter Assignment - Gibson vs Fender

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to investigate, summarize and provide insight into twitter data associated with the Fender and Gibson guitar brands, and to establish whether a relationship exists between tweets associated with those two brands and the guitarist Slash from Guns n Roses.

Definitions

Term	Description
Fender	A popular brand of electric guitar.
Gibson	A popular brand of electric guitar.
Slash	Guitar God. The most iconic rock guitarist of all time. Most-famously known for his tasty licks recorded while part of the band Guns n’ Roses (GnR), which was inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 2012. Slash recently rejoined the band in 2016 as part of their “Not in This Lifetime” tour, a tour which has already lasted over 3.5 years to-date, and which I’ve personally attended not less than 4 times in 3 different cities. GnR just recently announced that it plans to work on a new album, the first album with the original lineup in well over 20 years.

Required Packages

Some of the below information is redundant. For example, the dplyr package is contained within the tidyverse package. Both are provided when a package within tidyverse provides a particularly useful function. The packages required for this markdown are:

Package	Description
tidyverse	the tidyverse collection of packages all together
DT	makes interactive javascript data tables
skimr	has a useful “skim” function for quick summary data
dplyr	also in tidyverse; allows for easy data manipulation in R (filter, select, mutate, group_by, etc)
stringr	provides useful functions for searching for specifc strings within a character field
lubridate	provides useful date parsing and manipulation functions
ggplot2	makes graphs
httpuv	Allows us to securely communicate with the internet through R
rtweet	Allows us to collect and tweet from an existing twitter account from R

Raw Data

The data was pulled from twitter using the search criteria “guitar AND (gibson OR fender)” and was last-refreshed on 10/9/2019. The raw data was saved in a csv file and stored in a publicly-available one-drive folder. The raw data can be viewed below.

Question 1

What are the most-common hashtags associated with guitar-related twitter posts (limited to Fender and Gibson brands)?

For this question, I looked at the hashtags information provided for each tweet and used the str_split function from the stringr package to parse out each individual hashtag (most tweets have multiple hashtags if they do have hashtags). I then looked at common hashtags to determine which (if any) should be excluded. Hashtags such as “guitar”, “music”, “fender”, and “gibson” are obvious and carry no meaning to this particular question since we already know (per our original search criteria) that every tweet in the study contains one (or more) of these words.

The excluded hashtags are included in the next chart. Note that if these hashtags were included in the analysis, it would create a lot of “noise” that we’d have to sift through in order to get to a meaningful insight (and by meaningful, I mean one that we might not be able to derive by intuition alone had we not pulled the twitter data). To make the graph easier to read, I’m including only the hashtags that appear more than 30 times.

For the visualization, I narrowed in on hashtags that appear more than 30 times. Note that because I’m not aggregating like-words based on capitalization, some hashtags appear less-frequent than they really are. For example, if “stratocaster” and “Stratocaster” were added together, it would surpass “StevieRayVaughn” as the hashtag with the most tweets, and likewise, if “lespaul” and “Lespaul” were added together, if would become the third-most common tweet (just after Stratocaster and StevieRayVaughn). For the purpose of this assignment, I am ignoring the capitalization issue. Key observations are reported below the graph.

Key Observations:

1. Guitar tweets are very commonly associated with two popular guitarist, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Slash (from Guns n Roses), who both appear in the Top 5 of all commonly-used hashtags associated with the twitter search criteria “guitar AND (gibson OR fender)”.

2. The two most popular models of each guitar can be seen in the Top 5 hashtags as well. The Stratocaster is Fender’s most-popular guitar model and the Les Paul is Gibson’s most-popular guitar model. Both of these guitar players are associated with popular hard rock bands.

3. The hashtag “rock” also appears in the Top 5 of all hashtags. This indicates that the Fender and Gibson guitar brands are more-commonly associated with hard rock music (as opposed to other genres such as country or jazz or rap).

4. The Telecaster is another guitar model made by Fender which also appears on the list. Gibson does not have another guitar model in the top of the list. This indicates that Gibson is one-dimensionally associated with its most popular model, the Les Paul, whereas Fender has had more success over the years with marketing more than one of its guitar models.

5. The evidence of guitar tweets being associated with Slash (the guitarist from Guns n Roses) can also be seen in hashtags such as “gnr” (Gun n Roses), “GnFnR” (Guns n Fckn Roses), “Notinthislifetimetour” and “tophat” (which is part of Slash’s signature attire).

6. It’s interesting to note that both Stevie Ray Vaughn and Slash are widely known as being associated with these two guitar manufacturers, respectively (Stevie Ray Vaughn with Fender and Slash with Gibson), and the twitter data reinforces this belief empirically. There are no other guitar players who appear in the list of most-common hashtags associated with the twitter search criteria “guitar AND (fender OR gibson)”.

Question 2

How commonly is Slash associated with Fender versus Gibson guitars?

This question is an extension of the first. Noting that Slash is commonly associated with the twitter search criteria “guitar AND (gibson OR fender)”, I wanted to go one layer deeper to determine if the data supports my belief that Slash is more associated with the Gibson brand than he is the Fender brand.

For this analysis, I went back through the original twitter data and flagged records that contained the words “gibson”, “fender”, and “slash” using dummy variables (1’s for when the word was found and 0’s otherwise). For each tweet, I searched both the hashtags as well as the body of the tweet.

The results show that Slash appeared in a total of \(167\) tweets. Of those, Gibson appeared in \(160\) tweets, and Fender appeared in \(7\) tweets.

The Gibson brand is associated with \(95.8\) % of tweets containing reference to Slash, while the Fender brand is associated with only \(4.2\) % of tweets containing reference to Slash. This difference is quite astonishing, and strongly reinforces the belief that Slash is more associated with the Gibson guitar brand.

Question 3

Are there major differences in the hashtags associated with Fender versus Gibson, in general?

For this question, I did not exclude any hashtags from the analysis as I did in the first question because I wanted this analysis to be a bit more exploratory. In order to show the hashtag counts associated with each brand, I had to use the dummy variable coding that I derived in the previous analysis for question 2 and then plotted the hashtag counts separately.

The hashtag counts associated with Gibson, Fender, and Slash are plotted separately. The derived counts are shown in the table that follows, then followed by the frequency charts.

The popular hashtags associated with Gibson are:

guitar, vintagegibson, lespaul, music, slash, guitarsolo

The popular hashtags associated with Fender are:

guitar, vintageguitar, vintagefender, music, stratocaster, guitarra, guitarsolo

The popular hashtags associated with Slash are:

guitar, gibson, tophat, Marshall, lespaul, idol, GNR, GNFNR, cool, Notinthislifetimetour

In summary, there is quite a bit of overlap in the hashtags that appear commonly for both Gibson and Fender guitars. The “vintage” hashtags seem to appear more frequently with the Fender brand, “Slash” appears in the top hashtags for Gibson but not for Fender, while both brands are frequently associated with the tags music, guitarsolo, guitar, and guitarra (indicating both have a strong presence among spanish-speaking audiences). Perhaps predictably, the hashtags “tophat”, “gnr”, “gnfnr” “lespaul”, and “notinthislifetimetour” are all strongly associated with Slash. The “tophat” and the “lespaul” are both associated with Slash’s signature appearance, and “gnr”, “gnfnr” and “notinthislifetimetour” are all uniquely associated with the band Guns n Roses.

The fact that Slash appears in the twitter data frequently with other words that are commonly associated with his appearance (in casual conversation) leads me to believe that twitter could be used reliably to identify the popular attributes associated with a particular brand. For example, if “vintage” is a strong attribute of the Fender brand, then this detail could be used in future product development and/or marketing strategies. Likewise, the fact that Fender seems to have a much larger share of the “vintage” hashtags could indicator to Gibson that they need to increase their own marketing in this area if they wish to compete (not only in the resale market, but in the reproduction market as well).