Why so many tweets @realDonaldTrump?
06.29.2020 - Today's market sizing exercise
Hello Case Dojo,
We’ve all seen the power of Donald Trump’s tweets — they tend to stir up the news cycle. In the time that you are attempting this exercise, we hope he hasn’t tweeted anything that would incite a global conflict. Good luck and have fun!
Reminders
Spell out your thinking process, state your assumptions, and evaluate your final answer. There are many valid approaches to each problem.
No calculators are allowed, so make the math easy for yourself.
Try to come to an answer within 3-4 minutes at the longest (here’s a timer).
Today’s Question
How much did Donald Trump tweet in 2019?
Our sample answer
How we broke things down
We want to multiply the number of tweets per day by the number of days in a year.
Let's also segment days into different kinds of days because there are probably days with higher tweet counts (when Trump has a light schedule) and days with lower tweet counts (when he's out golfing or visiting someone abroad).
In order to get the number of tweets per day for each type of day, we can then segment by the time of the day and estimate each time of the day separately.
Assumptions we made
There are plenty of assumptions here, so sit tight.
Office: he often live-tweets Fox & Friends in the morning when he's in the office, so 15 tweets in the morning. Then, because he's already tweeted a lot in the morning, he tweets a low amount for the rest of the day (5 for afternoon, evening, and midnight).
Golf: we assume he golfs mostly during the afternoon, hence the 5 tweets. The rest of the day is relatively low stress, so he has more time to tweet (10 for each other time slot)
Travel: he is occupied with events morning and afternoon, hence 5 tweets. In the evening, he makes up all the tweets he was unable to tweet (15). He likely rests early on travel days to conserve energy, and thus the low number of tweets at midnight (5).
Campaign: campaign events are in the afternoon and evening, hence 5 tweets during those times. In the morning he tweets a sizeable amount, 10. At midnight, after he has riled up his crowds, he is likely tweeting a lot from adrenaline.
# of days spent golfing = 75, which is 1.5 times every week.
# of days spent traveling = 50, rough estimate for # of out of country trips he takes
# of days spent campaigning = 30, he hosts a rally once every 1-2 weeks.
Our evaluation
We arrive at 11625 tweets in 2019. This seems to be an overestimate as (1) when he is traveling, he likely tweets close to 0 during the day because he is attending events (2) when he is campaigning, 20 tweets at midnight still seems unrealistic even for Trump
Other potential approaches we like
Segment by original tweets and retweets
Segment days not by what he has scheduled, but by types of current events
Segment by types of tweets per day (ALL CAPS, announcements, video tweets, etc)
Actual answer
Trump tweeted 7700 times in 2019, up from 3600 in 2018.
Extras
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🤠 Fun Fact
Tweet Binder Twego estimates each Trump tweet is worth $99K, but if you include the amount of engagement on Trump's tweets, then the tweet is worth $1.2M.
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