Are Facebook Users More Optimistic than Twitter Users?

FROM: http://blog.gnip.com/are-facebook-users-more-optimistic-than-twitter-users/

Posted by Scott Hendrickson, Data Science

New Year’s Eve gives us a sense of closure on the past and an opportunity to make new dreams. With the emergence of social media, we can now see these reflections and resolutions transpire in realtime. As we observed the posts, comments, and tweets related to the New Year, we saw the typical expressions on Facebook and Twitter of best wishes for the coming year and pithy observations about the past year. What we didn’t expect was that users of the two popular social media sites would have different outlooks on the world.

As we enter 2012, Facebook users are more optimistic than Twitter users.

You’re probably wondering how we can say that. Well, we looked at all of the public posts on Facebook and Tweets on Twitter that contained “Happy New Year.” For all of those posts and Tweets, we compared the use of positive words such as “better” and “good” to the use of negative words such as “worse” and “bad.” We found that Tweets with positive words appeared 8 times more frequently than Tweets with negative words. You might be thinking a ratio of 8 to 1 is pretty optimistic…

It may be, but posts on Facebook had a ratio of 40 to 1–such a huge difference lead us to speculate that Facebook is a more optimistic place than Twitter.

Interesting stuff. Could be a variety of reasons for the difference, from the mix of users on each service to the fact that Facebook is used to communicate with friends, while Twitter is user to broadcast to followers. We’ll leave the speculation up to you.