Analyzing Energy FinTwit Tweets – Mr Skilling Edition

In this insight, we will be using the rtweet package in R to analyze the last 7 days of tweets targeted at @mr_skilling.

Who is Mr Skilling?

Aside from one of the most well-known corporate criminals in modern history (some small company called Enron), his alter-ego on Twitter is one of the most well-known members of the Energy FinTwit community. I thought it would be a fun thought experiment to do a quick analysis.

Methodology

Using the rtweet package, you can do a search of the last 7 days of tweets targeting specific characters. For this insight I chose the top 19 accounts tagging @mr_skilling in their tweets over the last week.

Figure 1: Top Profiles Tagging @mr_skilling – Last 7 days

Quick inspection reveals the typical EFT crowd, though his co-conspirator at Enron (Kenny Lay) seems quite active.

To further this analysis, I then searched every tweet tagging these individuals as well as @mr_skilling and filtered the dataset to only include tweets within this network.

Network

It is always intersting to look at network plot of these twitterers (tweeters?).

Figure 2: The Mr Skilling Network

Analytics

Let’s dig a bit deeper into the data.

Daily Activity

These guys are pretty active on the weekends, and like to keep the party going through Monday to drown out those Monday blues.

Figure 3: Daily Activity

Unprovoked

You can also use the rtweet package to see who initiates tweets and who is just responding to a thread.

Figure 4: Users initiating most tweets to others

@ManchesterUtd81, otherwise known as 90s Random Consultant, is all over it this last week.

Most Active

This one is a bit funny, just due to the sheer volume of tweets from the top individual. And this is just the top 20 within Skilling’s network! I don’t know if I want to know how much more he’s tweeting!

Figure 5: Most active in twitter

@mr_skilling isn’t even the most active in his own group (in fact he’s pretty far back). Ol’ Kenny Lay is averaging ~33 tweets a day within this network alone!

Word Cloud

And what would any twitter analysis be without a word cloud.

Bit funny to see words like kitty (probably due to @ShaleUnkitty’s penchant for calling themselves kitty). @chuck in homage to Mr. Chuck Yates aka nimblephatty is quite prominant as well. Other notables are wine and oil/energy.

Summary

Hope you enjoyed this insight! If I get 10 blog followers on this post I’ll keep this going every Sunday. And let me know in the comments if there’s anything else you want to see! I’ll try and pick a different EFT personality weekly.