There was a huge hype around Twitter data one or two years back. Then it was followed by suspicion and criticism Now we should take a more balanced view. Twitter data or social media data aren't all-powerful, but I believe that if we look at it from the right perspectives, we still could learn something meaningful, despite its demographic bias. But certainly we have to be very cautious about any conclusion we draw. This is still a work in progress and we'll try to extract unbiased information from the biased source.
A different approach that takes the social network graph into account is presented on http://www.celebs-vote.com
This seems to be a smoothed signal. Could it be that the smoothing carries some of the winning candidate mentions 'back in time'?
Good observation! It is actually a seven-day smoothing to offset some weekly periodicity, but the backward influence is very limited. We tested this with a hourly granularity without smoothening (the curves become really fuzzy), and it shows very similar results.
I read the whole thing and learned absolutely nothing.
It would have been nice to have a conclusion at the end... :)
Social media data and election are both very subjective topics. We tried to generate some insights, but we thought it would be better to let readers to interpret results themselves.