NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Twitter-ly speaking, Arkansas residents demonstrated a positively sunny mood yesterday. Tweeters in New Mexico and Louisiana? Not so much.
These fact-based observations, among other mood analyses, come from the “U.S. Social Sentiment Index” (USSI), included in an interactive feature debuting on WSJ.com, developed in partnership with business information provider IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO).
Analyzing the content of millions of Twitter messages each hour, the USSI gauges the nation’s mood in near-real time, including sub-indices by location and gender. The index will prove “valuable for organizations that need to understand markets and shifts among consumers in real time,” said Zbyszko Tabernacki, senior vice president – head of economics and country risk for IHS Markit.
“The USSI data stream has been shown to accurately represent key inflection points in public sentiment that can impact market volatility and short-term consumer behavior changes,” Tabernacki said. “We expect investors to leverage this new index to further enhance the fidelity of their forecasting models, and for companies, to assess the mind of the consumer.”
Designed by Janys Analytics, the Wall Street Journal / IHS Markit USSI utilizes a random sample of approximately 5 million U.S.-based tweets per day. The index incorporates machine learning and a scoring dictionary to evaluate the sentiment a message expresses, scales the mood score for all tweets within an hour, and segments by state and gender.
In its mood index published at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Monday, May 8, 2017 for example, the overall U.S. sentiment stood at 99 points, the same as the average Monday at that hour. At plus-6 points, Arkansas ranked as the most positive states, followed by Vermont, Alabama, Nebraska and New Hampshire, each at plus-5 points. New Mexico, at 90 points, and Louisiana (93 points) sat mired, relatively speaking, in the doldrums.
Index scores for the U.S. and for the states vary from a starting value of 100 points, which represents an average of all Twitter messages between January 2013 and January 2017. While sentiment increased from 2013 through 2015, it leveled off and declined in 2016 to today. The relative difference between one index value and another is the key to interpreting the sentiment index.
For more information about the USSI, contact Maria Bertram, senior director – product management for IHS Markit, at maria.bertram@ihsmarkit.com.
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