SpaceX and Blue Origin Comparison using Twitter API and Sentiment Analysis
SpaceX and Blue Origin often get compared as space companies. There are many similarities. Both companies were founded at a similar time, fly people on their capsules and initiated by tech billionaires. In this study, SpaceX and Blue Origin will be compared by means of their recent mentioned tweets in English and official account tweets.
Can we infer some perceptional information from the most common words in the tweets mentioning them?
To do this, we first need to have a process of turning a meaningful data. The text fields of Twitter API response need to be simplified by discarding the stop words.
As you can see from the first visualization below, both SpaceX and Blue Origin have the mostly repeated words that are their company names. The common words are only “space” and “spaceX”. SpaceX has “dragon” “crew”, “astronauts” and the “space_station” repeated words. Blue Origin’s repating words are “team”, “flight”, and “rocket”. SpaceX words are related to the most recent activities of the SpaceX. Dragon is the partially reusable cargo spacecraft developed by SpaceX and has been in use for couple of years. In 2020, SpaceX became the first private company to send NASA astronauts to the ISS. Blue Origin launched first human spaceflight 62 miles above the Earth’s surface aboard its New Shepard rocket with Jeff Bezos on 7/20/21. So those explain the frequency of such words for both companies. The same pattern can be seen also in the cloud word visualizations. Additionally, both have their popular owners names. However, Elon Musk also takes place in the Blue Origin’s cloud word visualization. We can say that people are more into what SpaceX does in Twitter.
What are the sentiments people have about two companies?
We need to get sentiment correspondences of the measurable words. I used the Bing sentiment lexicon to do this.
As you can see from the visualization below, SpaceX has more positive sentiments as “happy”, “peace”, “smiles” and less negative ones - " burn" - as the provided Twitter data. Blue Origins most positive sentiment is the “progress”, “rich” and “glad” and negative ones are “weird” , “complex” and “poor”. It looks like people are positive with the progress of the Blue Origin. On the other hand, some still think about the Blue Origin complex and poor.
How does sentiment change depending on the hours of day?
The Twitter API provided data around 2000 for each companies. There are much more mentions for SpaceX than Blue Origin such that 1991 SpaceX tweets had been sent between 2021-11-09 11:07:18 and 2021-11-09 14:09:02. However the same number of tweets for Blue Origin are are distributed for a longer time interval, between 2021-11-04 04:54:28 and 2021-11-09 14:07:52. Hence, a healthy comparison is not possible in this case. But at first glace we can say there is no negative sentiments for SpaceX with respect to Blue Origin.
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 “spacex” and “blueorigin” have been used to download users and the last tweet objects were sent by those users via Twitter API. The same number of tweets for each of them have taken into account. 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 shows SpaceX apprearently has a superority at all three categories. We can conclude from the Twiter data SpaceX is more popular.
To sum up, SpaceX is more popular and has more positive sentiments than Blue Origin as the Twitter data. This can be related to the huge popularity of Elon Musk in Twitter. But people are definitely are more interested in SpaceX.