Binance and Coinbase Comparison using Twitter API
Cryptocurrencies are non-governmental digital assets based on blockchain technology. While some people claim that they are the inevitable future of the financial system, others think that the whole system is a balloon. Despite being a controversial topic, cryptocurrencies already have their own exchange markets. The most famous ones are Binance and Coinbase. In this study, they will be compared by means of their recent official Twitter accounts and tweets.
Which one is more popular?
Measuring popularity requires a comparison of some parameters which are the number of followers, likes, and retweets. The official Twitter user names “binance” and “coinbase” have been used to download users and the last 2000 tweets objects were sent by those users via Twitter API. I got the 2000 tweets for each of them have distributed from the end of May to the end of September. User object has “followers_count” attribute for the number of followers. Tweet objects “favorite_count” and “retweet_count” has been used to calculate the number of likes and retweets.
Since tweets in this study are all from official accounts, we can compare popularity in terms of the number of followers, likes, and retweets. The bar graph above implies at all three categories Binance is almost double Coinbase. We can conclude from the Twiter data Binance is more popular.
How are the distributions of tweets over time of Binance and Coinbase official accounts?
Since the Twitter data is for a long period, from the end of May to the end of September, and there are 2000 tweets for each exchange market, the distribution of the tweets over time may help us understand who gives more importance to the Twitter account and who uses more properly.
Both frequency visuals by week and weekdays show that Binance tweets have been distributed more uniformly than the Coinbase ones. Binance nearly keeps such uniformity for the weekends as well. However, we see a big drop in the number of weekend tweets of Coinbase.
Can we say something about responsiveness?
Tweet object has an attribute “reply_to_user_id” that tells us this is a reply tweet. They both must have gotten a lot of tweets daily. So the number of reply tweets might tell us about responsiveness.
The visual above has been obtained by counting the reply, retweets, and others for Binance and Coinbase. Again the same dataset was used. Here another category is the normal tweets sent by their official accounts. This time Coinbase has a larger number of retweets and especially replies(more than 3 times). Those reply tweets may be related to some reported issues or complaints of the customers. Or there might be other official accounts for those kinds of reply tweets. However, as having more than 5 million followers, there must be a lot of tweets daily sent to those accounts. In all cases responding to the customers in a timely manner is an advantage.
To conclude Binance has more popularity and more balanced and professional usage of the official Twitter account. Coinbase looks more responsive to the customers.