Introdution

As a Trader Joe’s enthusiat, I performed a comparitive analysis on Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. I used the Twitter API and the RTweet package and pulled 2000 observations of recent tweets on September 26th. I’m interested to learn the location of the tweets, the highest follower count for both grocery stores, and the number of daily tweets on a specific date.

Question#1: What are the top 10 locations of Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods shoppers?

## Selecting by n

Top 5 cities for Trader Joe’s shoppers are from LA, Chicago, NYC, Atlanta and Dallas. Since Trader Joe’s only operates in the US, there are no foreign cities in the list.

## Selecting by n

Top 5 cities of Whole Foods shoppers are from LA, Chicago, NYC, Washington DC and Vancouver. Since Whole Foods operates internationally, there is a foreign city, Vancouver that appears in the ranking.

Question 2: Which store was mentioned more by users with higher follower counts?

## # A tibble: 20 x 2
##    followers_count counts
##              <dbl>  <int>
##  1         1421510      1
##  2          385047      2
##  3          354967      1
##  4          321707      1
##  5          138774      1
##  6          133109      1
##  7          116855      1
##  8           57554      1
##  9           55570      1
## 10           54038      1
## 11           52699      1
## 12           52187      1
## 13           46966      2
## 14           41886      2
## 15           40950      1
## 16           40909      1
## 17           40477      1
## 18           39242      1
## 19           35487      1
## 20           34247      2

The highest followers counts for Trader Joe’s is 1.4MM

## # A tibble: 20 x 2
##    followers_count counts
##              <dbl>  <int>
##  1        54726720      1
##  2         7530645      2
##  3         1738276      1
##  4          798098      1
##  5          797708      3
##  6          681754      1
##  7          658640      1
##  8          428727      1
##  9          416990      9
## 10          294097      1
## 11          275496      1
## 12          269643      1
## 13          259974      1
## 14          253545      2
## 15          243826      1
## 16          224016      1
## 17          182521      1
## 18          155155      2
## 19          152986      7
## 20          134023      1

The highest followers counts for Whole foods is about 55MM.

Based on the summary of the both datasets, Trader Joe’s tweets have an average followers counts of 3714, while Whole Foods tweets have 44,933. Whole Foods was mentioned by more high profile twitter accounts, partly due to the news of newly added $9.95 charge to its delivery service was published by multiple giant news outlets.

On the contrary, Trader Joe’s has never offered delivery or grocery pickup options, but chose to invest in people and focus on low product prices. Tweets that mentioned Trader Joe’s were mainly foods/products-related. So it makes sense real people who enjoy food have a relatively lower followers count.

Question 3: Which store receive more tweets in one single day, specifically September 25th?

## # A tibble: 3 x 2
##    date counts
##   <int>  <int>
## 1    24    196
## 2    25   1111
## 3    26    693

Trader Joe’s was mentioned 1111 times on September 25th. Even though Trader Joe’s doesn’t have an official presence on Twitter, it was able to rely on word of mouth to strengthen its brand and build customer loyalty.

## # A tibble: 3 x 2
##    date counts
##   <int>  <int>
## 1    24    644
## 2    25    831
## 3    26    525

Whole Foods was mentioned 831 times on the same date, which is 25% less than Trader Joe’s.