Five Years of Villa Somalia Tweets: Analyzed in 7 Charts
Villa Somalia’s tweets are mostly about the President’s travel itinerary, statements from forums and summits he attended, and general news updates.
In Nov 2012, Villa Somalia created its first official Twitter handle, @VillaSomalia, just two months into the presidency of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. The timeline is filled with news from the presidency, updates from foreign travels and forums, condolences and condemnations against attacks by Al Shabaab (AS), etc.
For my first post, I decided to pull and pour over this dataset of 2737 tweets. That is every tweet sent out by Villa Somalia since its creation up to Nov 21, 2017, to see what insights we can learn from this dataset; what follows is the result of my analysis.
The languages of Villa Somalia’s tweets
English is the lingua franca of Villa Somalia, at-least in the twitter world. According to the dataset, the handle tweets predominantly using English – 63 percent of the time, followed by Somali, the national language – at 36 percent. Arabic is also used but not much – only 24 tweets – and mostly referencing the President’s state visits and summits to the the Arab world.
Post collapse Somali Government continues to grapple with mainstreaming the Somali language back into its institutions. English is everywhere. The relationship with the language, though, is one of love and hate. Villa Somalia outlaws it using tweets and letters written in English; here is one such tweet from 2015.
President orders use of #Somali as official language of communication
The President: “To protect and promote our… http://t.co/hW0ihiFt3W
— Villa Somalia (@TheVillaSomalia) January 21, 2015
Here is one more language, see if you can help me identify it.
Le président de la Somalie a accepté des lettres d’accréditation d’Antoine Sivan, le nouvel ambassadeur de la France en Somalie. @French_Gov pic.twitter.com/8Vx84Sqwbt
— Villa Somalia (@TheVillaSomalia) July 25, 2017
What does Villa Somalia tweet about?
Villa Somalia’s tweets are mostly about the President’s travel itinerary, statements from forums and summits he attended, and general news updates.
Here are the most frequently used English words by Villa Somalia.
Frequently used words in Somali, more or less mirrors the English version.
The Wednesday Government: Tweets By Day
For 2017, Wednesday stands out as the busiest day of the week for the media staff at Villa Somalia. The day is a sort of the current government’s lucky day. It marked both the election of Speaker Jawaari and President Farmaajo, and it appears they continued to favor and fill it with important schedules, such as the President’s inauguration, the PM and his cabinet’s approval by the parliament, state visits, appointment of senior officials including the chief of staff, and many others.
Tweets by Time
More than two-thirds of all tweets by Villa Somalia are sent after 12 pm, with most tweets falling between 1 pm and 7 pm. Nearly sixty percent of tweets in reaction to Al Shabaab attacks are posted between 10 am to 4 pm, shedding some light on terror attack patterns. Half of the tweets on news and other general updates are sent out between 1 pm and 6 pm.
Source of Tweets
Villa Somalia used a total of 13 devices and platforms to send tweets. In 2017, tweets were being sent out from only 3 platforms, mostly iPhone – 40%, followed by Android 34%, and lastly, Twitter Web Client – 26% of the time.
Methodology:
Data for this post was pulled from the Villa Somalia handle on Nov 21, 2017, around 5 pm. The data cleaning removed tweets that are of notification with only links to now non-existing content posted to Facebook, link-only tweets, as well as retweets from other Twitter users.