Can Tweets Predict Election Results? Insights from Twitter Analytics

Abstract

Social media has emerged as a powerful tool where people can share their common point of interest. Political events such as elections are one such event that attracts many social media users, to share their common view point and support towards a political party. This paper tries to capitalize this power of social media in order to predict the outcome of 2018 Pakistan General elections using Twitter as a tool. We fetched 33,468 tweets related to Pakistan Election over a span of 10 days. To get better insights of the results various social media analytic techniques were employed. Our results depict that Imran Khan led PTI was clear favorite among masses, which actually coincided with actual election results, where PTI emerged as a single largest party, making Imran Khan its Prime Minister.