Console Wars on Twitter

For my twitter analysis I will be using the tweets that mentioned @Xbox or the word “Xbox” and tweets that mentioned the word “PlayStation” or their corporate account @PlayStation. I will be using these tweets in order to understand some of the differences between the corporations on twitter. This is in reference to the “Console Wars” which is a fictional war between Sony and Microsoft and their respective gaming companies.

The first questions that I will be asking will be seeing just who has a better presence on social media when it comes to the amount of tweets that are about the companies. I will be doing this by counting the number of users that mention either company in a tweet.

Here, we are able to see that both companies have similar mentions of both their name as well as their corporate accounts. Although it is a little difficult to see, Xbox has more mentions than PlayStation by 4 tweets. This is interesting to see, but can also be understandable. PlayStation has more followers than Xbox but Xbox has many more tweets.

In order to understand more about the kind of engagement that these companies have, we’ll be looking at the engagement that is directly in reply to their corporate accounts. In order to do this, I’ll be looking to see any tweet that replied to the Xbox or PlayStation corporate accounts, as well as their parent companies.

What’s interesting here is that PlayStation takes a bit of a higher lead over Xbox when it comes to corporate account mentions. This tells us that although people may be talking about or tagging Xbox more than PlayStation, PlayStation has better engagement with their corporate tweets getting replies. This is a bit understandable, since PlayStation has 6.5 million more followers. Although, I figured that Xbox’s tweet volume would help them out in this situation.

What type of tweeters are interacting with PlayStation and Xbox?

In this analysis, we are taking a more in-depth approach to see what kinds of accounts are talking about these companies. How many followers do these accounts have? Are they active accounts? These and more questions will be answered in my analysis. First up, we will look at the followers of each account. NOTE: in order to get data that doesn’t include accounts that could be bots, we are using a minimum follower count of 707, the average followers per twitter account.

Based on this visualization, we are able to see that both companies tend to have engagement that is from people with around 1,000 followers. However, we can also note that it seems like there are a lot more accounts with more than 707 followers that talk about Xbox. What we can also see is that Xbox has accounts that have higher follower counts tweeting about them. With many above 100,000 while Playstation only has one.

The next visualization will determine how many verified accounts are tweeting about these companies. I will use the verified dummy variable here, looking only where this is true in order to get the verified accounts.

Verified accounts seem to be tweeting about Xbox more than they tweet about PlayStation. This could possibly be because there are more Xbox ambassadors. However, this is to be expected because of the analysis we just completed on the follower count.

Next, we will review the overall activity of these accounts that tweet at the companies. This lets us know which company has a more active following. I will use the amount of tweets as well as favorites that these accounts have in order to understand which base is more active on an aggregate scale, and not just in their tweets about Xbox or PlayStation.

Xbox or PS Average Tweets Most Tweets Median Tweets Average Favorites Most Favorites Median Favorites
ps 9444.311 234312 1931 14056.29 285626 2532
xbox 11329.753 680561 3343 16881.60 415661 5501

Here we can see that, on average, Xbox has more tweets from its followers by almost 2000. Something else interesting to note is that Xbox is higher in every category. This tells us that although PlayStation has more followers than Xbox, Xbox would appear to have a more active following.

In order to understand a little more about the people that are tweeting, we will also look at when they created their account. This will give us a better idea of possible ages and also twitter understanding. I will use the date column to figure out the years that each account was created, and then count how many user accounts were created in that year.

It is a relatively equal amount of accounts that talk about PlayStation and Xbox from 2007-2018. However, we notice that both companies see a higher amount of people that are creating accounts more recently. Xbox has an edge over PlayStation in new accounts that are talking about them. So, maybe there is going to be a continuous increase in people that talk about Xbox from younger accounts and Xbox will grow in their engagement.

What do the feeds of these companies look like?

Using a sentiment analysis we will be able to figure out whether a tweet has a positive or negative sentiment about it. We will also be able to tell whether or not there is a question or statement in the replies. First, we will be looking at the sentiment of the tweets based on the words said in them. Each positive word was awarded a 1 while each negative word was awarded a -1.

When it comes to positive and negative word use, we used a sum to understand the total positive and negative words used. As we can see, both companies are talked about relatively positively on twitter. Although Xbox has a slight lead on PlayStation, both are talked about positively and negatively at a relatively similar rate.

Next, we will look at whether or not there are questions or statements being asked in the tweets. This will help us see if there are a lot of support questions being asked or if there is actual conversation happening. I will be detecting for a question mark to determine if the tweet was a question.

This is good to see for these companies. As sometimes people can confuse their support counterparts for the actual corporate accounts. Actual statements in these comment sections means that there is active and healthy talking going on when mentioning these companies.