Public Opinion Polling with Twitter

Understand

Solicited public opinion surveys reach a limited subpopulation of willing participants and are expensive to conduct, leading to poor time resolution and a restricted pool of expert-chosen survey topics.

• In this study, we demonstrate that unsolicited public opinion polling through sentiment analysis applied to Twitter correlates well with a range of traditional measures, and has predictive power for issues of global importance.
• We also examine Twitter's potential to canvas topics seldom surveyed, including ideas, personal feelings, and perceptions of commercial enterprises.
• Two of our major observations are that appropriately filtered Twitter sentiment (1) predicts President Obama's job approval three months in advance, and (2) correlates well with surveyed consumer sentiment.