Battle of the Streaming Sites: Netflix vs. Hulu

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Introduction

This document aimed to look at how Netflix and Hulu differentiated on the Twitter space in terms of posts and engagement. However, I started to ask some different questions looking at the streaming sites as I began to learn just how large the difference is between the Twitter engagement of each platform.

Question 1: Which Streaming Site is More Active on Twitter, and does this lead to more followers or likes?

With this question, I wanted to analyze the correlation between the number of posts between the two rival streaming services along with their popularity. In order to answer this question, I looked at the last 2000 posts from either streaming site’s twitter handle. This pulled the past 2000 posts from either twitter handle, so this graph below displays which twitter handle had more posts since March 3rd, the day when the last tweet was pulled from. The graph shows that Hulu has surprisingly posted or replied more than Netflix in this time frame. However, does this activity correlate to more interaction on their posts?

What I found in the summary statistic below is that while Hulu has been more active on their Twitter page, Netflix has had A LOT more interaction on their posts than Hulu. To find this data, I used the posts from Hulu and Netflix’s twitter pages and took the averages of their favorites and retweets on all of their posts. The results of this stunned me as I always thought that the two companies were very close in competition and popularity. Instead, Netflix averages almost 5000 favorites and 700 retweets while Hulu only averages a meager 21 favroites and 3 retweets.

screen_name	Average Favorites	Average Retweets
hulu	21.89848	3.611675
netflix	4604.14692	692.260663

Question 2: Do Streaming Sites Prioritize Posting on certain days of the week?

For this question, I wanted to look more in-depth on when both of these competitors are posting on Twitter, and I was again a little surprised with the results. First, I pulled data from the last 2000 posts from either the Netflix or Hulu twitter handle. Once I did that, I was able to utilize the date that the post was made and made a graph that looks at posts made on each day of the week. The graph below looks at what days of the week both streaming sites post the most. I was surprised to see that the middle of the week is the most popular time for these accounts to post, and it made me ask if these posts lead to the most likes and retweets.

To look at the success of posts on certain days, I used the similar data and took the average amount of favorites from that data. The graphs below look at both Hulu and Netflix’s average favorites on tweets during each day of the week. The Netflix graph shows that more people are liking their tweets during the weekend, which is what I would have figured considering more adults and kids are less busy during the weekend and have more time on Twitter. For Hulu, they do not even post on the weekends! From looking at these graphs, I would want to look more into if this is true for other companies and to see if more companies should try being more active during the weekends on social media.

Question 3: Which streaming site do people talk about more, and is it in a positive light?

This final question looks at which streaming site is talked about more on Twitter. To do this, I found 2000 tweets with either the streaming sites tagged in the posts or just the streaming sites’ names in the posts (retweets were stripped). This first graph looks at which posts contained Hulu or Netflix in the post. The graph shows that the majority of the posts where talking about Netflix, with the posts totaling over 1500. This is further showing the evidence that Netflix is more popular and talked about than Hulu.

Now, what kind of things are people saying about the two platforms. To answer this, I did a sentiment analysis to look at which posts contained words such as “good”, “bad”, “great”, “terrible” and so forth. If the posts contained positive feedback, it would get a +1, and a -1 if the post had negative feedback. Once I made that sentiment analysis, I filtered it by streaming site to see what sentiment people had for both platforms. This graph shows that overall, there is positive sentiment for both streaming sites. However, I was surprised that it was as close as it was. I would have figured that since the majority of the posts were about Netflix, they would have had a much higher sentiment anaylsis score.