Who knew that Twitter could do more than challenge social mediaites to express themselves, an event or a feeling in 146 characters. But the social network tool is proving to be much more than a quirky way of sharing events, moods, and opinions. Just last week a Twitter campaign fueled the fire over one CEO's political leanings and played a role in making Mozilla's chief step down.
Now Twitter is proving to be quite the data analysis mechanism for a new publication regarding the geography of beer and alcohol intake. Tweets are playing a starring role in a new chapter in the new book "The Geography of Beer" (Springer, 2014), written by Matthew Zook, a geographer at the University of Kentucky.
The research team apparently collected tweets, about a million, between June, 201 and May 2013, that contained the words 'beer,' 'wine,' and alcoholic beverage preference data and pulled them into a database with geotagging capabilities.
"This is really where it gets really exciting, when you start comparing what kinds of things are being tweeted in a particular place versus what's being tweeted in another place," Zook told one news outlet. "There's where you start getting some interesting differences in attention or cultural preoccupation."
The resulting data shows Twitters users living on the east and west coasts apparently tweet more about wine, and like to discuss the current light beer offerings, than counterpart drinkers living in the middle of the country.
California and the Northeast love wine, Colorado and the Midwest love beer, according to new maps based on the Twitter data.
That's really not much of a surprise given where vineyards are located in the U.S. and the fact that certain beer makers have used Colorado's scenery as marketing images for decades.
The research reveals cheaper beers are clustered around their breweries of origin: Sam Adams in New England and Chicago's Goose Island around the Great Lakes. Southern Californians love the Corona. Those living in upstate New York and Michigan were twitter happy about Saranac, while Twitter users in Colorado and New Mexico are loyal to Coors.
That insight and some subset data may prove useful to beer makers:
"While Bud Light is more popular in the eastern and southeastern US, Coors Light tends to dominate the west coast, with Miller Lite and Busch Light being preferred in the Midwest and Great Plains," states a release on the Twitter data project.
