Introduction

The purpose of this document is to perform a comparative analysis on the Twitter presences between two rival chili franchises in Cincinnati: Skyline Chili and Gold Star Chili. For many families in the Tri-State Area, it’s a heated debate as to which restaurant has the better chili. Although I can’t objectively discover which one has the best chili, I can do my best to compare which restaurant has the best Twitter presence. I selected a sample of 500 tweets that either mentioned Skyline’s Twitter handle or Gold Star’s Twitter handle. The dates of the selected tweets range from May 2nd to May 10th, which was Mother’s Day. With both restaurants’ accounts created within 4 months of each other in 2009, I’m hoping it will be somewhat competitive between the two.

Packages Required

The packages in R I loaded up and used are listed below along with their purpose in my analysis:

tidyverse: The tidyverse is a collection of open source R packages that help model, transform, and visualize data. In the tidyverse, I used the ggplot2 package throughout my analysis to create my visualizations, and I used the dplyr package to filter and manipulate the data.

To install this package in R, use the following command: install.packages(c(“tidyverse”))

Comparative Analysis

Question #1 How many favorites and retweets did each restaurant receive on average?

Favorites and retweets are probably the best indicators of how engaging a Twitter post was. With a holiday approaching (Mother’s Day), I am curious to see if either restaurant took advantage of the opportunity to promote itself effectively on Twitter. I filtered posts exclusively mentioning each restaurant and then averaged out the amount of favorites and retweets Skyline and Gold Star received in the past 8 days. I extracted the averages and placed them into a separate datable to then be displayed in a clustered bar chart.

As indicated by the above graph, it appears Skyline dominates on Twitter in comparison to Gold Star, especially in the average amount of favorites with a significant margin of 2.635. However, Skyline barely beats Gold Star in the average amount of retweets by .053. Regardless, Skyline’s dominance is probably attributed to the fact that Skyline has 30,000 more followers than Gold Star. It’s important to note, though, that Gold Star opened up their Twitter account 4 months before Skyline, so both franchises have had plenty of time to strategize their social media presence. It appears Skyline has and will continue to have the edge of Gold Star in popularity and engagement.

Question #2 How many unique Twitter users mentioned Mother’s Day along with each Restaurant?

Holidays are great opportunities for businesses to promote deals, discounts, promotions, and above all else, engage with their followers. Although quarantine is still in effect for the Tri-State Area, that didn’t stop some families from picking up food from either restaurant and letting the world know about it on Twitter. I filtered all Twitter posts exclusively for each restaurant, and then filtered for all variations of “Mother” and “Grandmother”, such as “mom” or “grandma”. I displayed a count of posts made from each Twitter user and then summed up the total amount of posts mentioning Mother’s Day for each restaurant.

## # A tibble: 6 x 2
##   user_id                 n
##   <chr>               <int>
## 1 x17647647               2
## 2 x22176791               1
## 3 x434668978              1
## 4 x473405211              1
## 5 x609008726              1
## 6 x874281777703133185     1
## [1] 7
## # A tibble: 1 x 2
##   user_id       n
##   <chr>     <int>
## 1 x16375725     1
## [1] 1

Skyline ended up with 7 posts from 6 unique users, and Gold Star only ended up with 1 post from 1 unique user. This further explains why Skyline has more followers than Gold Star, as it appears that more people will talk about Skyline on holidays.

Question #3 How are Cincinnati chili fans posting on Twitter?

Knowing which device your followers are posting from is necessary to understand where your strengths or weaknesses are. If one company has a singificant amount of engagement from Apple users compared to Android users, then they should invest more of their advertising budget targeting Android users.

While I expected Skyline to dominate in the total number of users, I didn’t expect them to have a disproprotionately large amount of Apple users compared to other device users. Although Gold Star rarely received Twitter engagement, the distribution is roughly even among Android users, Apple users, and those who used the Twitter Web Application. It seems Skyline could look into placing advertisements on Android phones to continue their growth on Twitter.