Why is Twitter Such an Amazing Dataset for Sentimental Analysis?

Social Networks are very popular media for people to express their views. From politics to daily use products, one can find opinions from people across the globe at these platforms.

One such social network is Twitter. Twitter sets itself apart from its contemporaries by two of its very unique features.
1. The 140-characters policy: Twitter limits the number of characters that a user may use in a tweet. This policy causes the user to express views/opinions with brevity resulting in tweets being extremely concise and to the point.
2. The Hashtags: Twitter was the pioneer of the hashtag which is nothing but a string of characters that groups tweets that belong to the same theme. Fun fact: The word hashtag is actually a pun. Hashtags are used to group data with a common theme and a hashing is a technique that maps data with common features into the same slots. In retrospect, it seems that the this pun may have been the reason for the makers of the hashtag to choose the hash (#) symbol in place of any other ($ or ^).

When one looks at twitter from the perspective of a user, it seems like platform for expressing/reading others’ views. But, when one looks at it from the perspective of a data analyst, it is a repository of humongous amount of data. Data that conveys valuable information. Data that is concise and data that is grouped together by hashtags. Thereby, making twitter an exceptional data set for performing sentimental analysis.