Makeover Monday: The Tweeting Habits of President-Elect Trump

On January 20th, we’ll have a new President of the United States. With Inauguration Day just a few days away, it seemed appropriate to look at the tweet of President-Elect Trump for Makeover Monday week 3. BuzzFeed News analyzed all the accounts Donald Trump retweeted during his presidential campaign and created this visualisation to accompany it (Note: The visualisation was trimmed for this blog) -

What works well?

• The bubbles are ordered from largest to smallest from left to right in a Z-pattern making it pretty simple who he tweets the most.
• Colouring inactive accounts so they are easier to identify

What could be improved?

• Bubble charts are notoriously hard to use for comparison; a simple bar chart would be so much easier to read.
• The viz lacks insight or a story.
• The article has some in-depth writing; would have been great to include that in the visualisation.

I must admit that I struggled a bit this week. I was trying too many charts and had trouble focusing my story. On top of that, I messed up the TDE that I created for everyone. Note that when you use the DATEPARSE function hh means hour in am/pm (1~12) whilst HH means hour in day (0~23). I had used hh initially which made it look like Trump takes lunch off from Twitter.

I really liked Eva’s idea of using the Montserrat font that’s on Trump’s website, so I’ve knicked that idea. I also wanted to stick to Twitter’s official color palette and try as much as possible to quantify and simplify the amount of tweets that Trump produces. With these in mind, here’s my Makeover Monday week 3 visualisation: