All the President’s Tweets
By: Adilbek Madaminov
Tags: Python, Trump Tweets, Trump, Data Visualization, Data Science

Despite a roller coaster-like tweeting rate, the Likes remained relatively steady in the range from 50 to 100 thousand Likes per tweet on average. Notice how the red line that represents Likes stays above the volume of tweets in the first two years, but drops below them in the later years. What this likely shows is that more tweeting didn’t translate to more Likes per tweet. Actually, if there is any relationship between the volume of tweets and their likeability, it appears to be a negative one where more tweeting is making the tweets less popular. This is more noticeable in 2018 and 2019.

You can also observe an annual pattern with the Likes where they seem to be higher in the beginning and end of the year, and lower in the middle. Of course, this is not to suggest that the likeability of tweets is driven by natural seasons, but more likely by the content of the tweets which in its own turn might be driven by seasons.

It would be an omission to move on without mentioning the spike in Likes in November of 2020. There are a few reasons that make this month special, but chief among those, of course, is the loss of his re-election. It is possible that the spike is a show of support from his followers on Twitter in light of the hard news, but it would be wrong to put too much weight on the month because this is an incomplete month (the dataset includes tweets up to 9:00 am on November 24, 2020), and because many of Trump’s tweets in November were flagged with Twitter’s new disinformation label, making them not possible to interact with. And that leaves the month with even fewer tweets to work with for calculating average likes.

Tweets by Day of Week

Most people structure their days differently based on the day of the week, and the most common example of that is weekdays versus weekends. We do things differently on our days off versus our work days: we watch TV more or less, exercise more or less, and use social media more or less. Can we observe any such patterns with President Trump’s tweets during his week?

It turns out, President Trump tweets remarkably consistently every day of the week. Although there appears to be a small rise and decline as the week unfolds, especially in 2017 and 2018, by and large President Trump does not appear to take any days off from Twitter. In 2020, this slight pattern even reverses, and the middle of the week actually becomes the less active period (although with over 30 tweets per day it is less active only by a few tweets).

Tweets by Time of Day

It has been common to hear reports of President Trump sending tweets very late at night or very early in the morning, in addition to the usual hours of the day. So when I started working on this dataset, I was curious to see how President Trump’s tweeting frequency would look by time of day. And here is what that looks like:

This graph contains a lot of information, but I thought the most striking observation is how little President Trump sleeps, especially in the last two years. Looking at 2020, his bedtime appears to be from about 1:00 am to 6:00 am, a meager 5 hours. And sleep, or whatever is left of it, seems to be the only thing that stops him from tweeting, because in all the other times of the day he sends anywhere from 1 to 3 tweets per hour.

The period in the morning from 7:00 am to 11:00 am appears to be the most active time of the day, with over 2 tweets per hour, based on the 2020 tweets. And the most active hour within that period is 8:00 am to 9:00 am, with over 3 tweets in that hour. Interestingly, but probably not surprisingly, the next most active period is late at night, from about 9:00 pm to 1:00 am, with about 2 tweets per hour.

Most (and Least) Active Days

After seeing the remarkable volume and consistency of tweets, it may be interesting to ask what President Trump’s most, and least, active tweeting days were. And how many tweets made them qualify for the top rank. So here are President Trump’s top 10 most active tweeting days: