Hulu vs Netflix Twitter Activity

I decided to collect the last 1,000 tweets by both Hulu and Netflix to analyze their respective social media strategies as well as how their followers respond to their tweets. To collect the data, I simply pulled the timeline of @hulu and @netflix. The API only loaded 991 results from Netflix but did pull Hulu’s last 1,000 tweets.

Tweets By Day of the Week

First, I was curious to see if there was any pattern for what day of the week each streaming service was most active. To search for trends, I grouped each company’s tweets by day of the week in which they were posted and displayed them in the bar charts below.

It is clear that Hulu increases Twitter activity heading into weekends with almost half of all their tweets taking place on Friday. Netflix, on the other hand, has the majority of their tweets in the middle of the week with Tuesday having the most tweets and their tweet distribution more evenly distributed throughout weekdays compared to Hulu.

Tweets by Time of Day

Next, I wanted to explore if the two streaming services had times of the day that they had increased of decreased Twitter activity. I assume they would tweet mostly during the day or night in American time zones but it would be interesting to see if they posted most of their content in the morning, afternoon, or evening or even if there was no pattern. To do this, I grouped each streaming service’s tweets by hour of the day and displayed them on a bar graph.

The results of this analysis surprised me. It appears that Hulu conducted most of their activity at night, while Netflix has most of their activity in the afternoon and evening in American timezones. Most of Hulu’s posts were created at 5pm EST while Netflix were more spread out between 11am and 7pm EST.

Importance of Pictures

Finally, I was curious if adding multimedia to tweets increased the amount of interaction Hulu and Twitter had with their followers. To do this, I grouped each account’s tweets by whether they included a photo or not and calculated the average number of favorites for tweets with and without pictures included.

media_type Hulu’s Total Favorites Hulu’s Total Tweets Hulu’s Average Favorites
None 13665 835 16.36527
photo 33471 165 202.85455
media_type Netflix’s Total Favorites Netflix’s Total Tweets Netflix’s Average Favorites
None 459347 542 847.5037
photo 2847446 449 6341.7506

The results of this were also surprising to me as it showed some important things for each streaming service. For Hulu, only 16.5% of their tweets had pictures but the ones with pictures received over 12.5 times the amount of favorites than those that did not. Netflix, on the other hand, had almost half of their tweets with pictures and the ones with pictures had approximately 7.5 times the amount of favorites than those without. This tells me that followers are significantly more likely to notice or interact with tweets that include multimedia. It also showed that Netflix has many more people interacting with their Twitter posts.