Local vs National Restaurants: Localness Drives Greater Rates of Engagement on Twitter
Loading...
Date
Authors
Kondo, Kelly
Conferti, Bella
Li, Yuhui
Shi, Yuwei
White, Tyler
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to analyze differences in Twitter engagement, defined as likes and retweets, between local Eugene restaurants and comparable national restaurants. For this study, the companies we analyzed are: Track Town Pizza/Pizza Hut, Little Big Burger/Wendy’s, Joe’s Burgers/Burger King, Burrito Boy/Qdoba, Ambrosia/Olive Garden, The Sandwich League/Panera, Dutch Bros Coffee/Starbucks, Off the Waffle/iHop, Elk Horn Brewery/BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse, and Prince Pucklers/Baskin-Robbins. This study used packages in the R statistics environment to scrape data from Twitter. Likes and retweets were divided by each company’s number of
Twitter followers to control for a disproportionate number of engagements resulting from different follower counts. We hypothesized that in a comparison of Twitter engagement for local versus comparable national restaurants, the local restaurants will be more likely to have a greater proportion of engagement to followers than national restaurants. The results suggest that local restaurants have a higher average number of likes, proportional to their follower count, when compared to national restaurants. However, the results were not significant when comparing proportional numbers of average retweets between local and national restaurants. Our results indicate that local restaurants may be more focused on social media marketing instead of traditional marketing, especially in comparison with national restaurants.
Description
Single page poster
Keywords
Undergraduate Research Symposium, Social media, Twitter, Retweets, Local restaurants, National restaurants, Data analysis