Royal wedding Twitter sentiment

It’s not often that you get such a large and public event that causes an entire nation to talk about it (whether for or against). The royal wedding was one of those rare occasions, and one which I was eager to tie into my work with Twitter sentiment analysis. How did Twitter react? Read on and I’ll let you decide for yourself.

It's not often that you get such a large and public event that causes an entire nation to talk about it (whether for or against). The royal wedding was one of those rare occasions, and one which I was eager to tie into my work with Twitter sentiment analysis. How did Twitter react? Read on and I'll let you decide for yourself.

In the end I captured 202,760 tweets across the day, which is pretty impressive considering only two days before I captured around 160,000. What's even more impressive is that the Twitter Streaming API only gives me access to around 1% of all tweets, so there could have been around 20,000,000 tweets sent by mobile phone within the UK on the wedding day. If you didn't already know, that's an incredible number!

So here's the sentiment graph, which I suggest that you click on to view in a larger size. I'll leave you to ponder its meaning.

I'll leave you with a few interesting statistics:

There were 23,440 tweets sent between 11am and 12pm (the most all day) – probably over 2,000,000 if you take into consideration that I only had access to 1% of tweets
There were 517 tweets sent at 11:53am as the national anthem was being sung – probably over 51,000 if you take into consideration that I only had access to 1% of tweets
People seemed very happy about the royal couple having a snog on a balcony
The actual marriage wasn't so happy compared to other moments through the day