Exploring public mood toward commodity markets: a comparative study of user behavior on Sina Weibo and Twitter

Purpose Sina Weibo and Twitter are the top microblogging platforms with billions of users. Accordingly, these two platforms could be used to understand the public mood. In this paper, the authors want to discuss how to generate and compare the public mood on Sina Weibo and Twitter. The predictive power of the public mood toward commodity markets is discussed, and the authors want to solve the problem that how to choose between Sina Weibo and Twitter when predicting crude oil prices. Design/methodology/approach An enhanced latent Dirichlet allocation model considering term weights is implemented to generate topics from Sina Weibo and Twitter. Granger causality test and a long short-term memory neural network model are used to demonstrate that the public mood on Sina Weibo and Twitter is correlated with commodity contracts. Findings By comparing the topics and the public mood on Sina Weibo and Twitter, the authors find significant differences in user behavior on these two websites. Besides, the authors demonstrate that public mood on Sina Weibo and Twitter is correlated with crude oil contract prices in Shanghai International Energy Exchange and New York Mercantile Exchange, respectively. Originality/value Two sentiment analysis methods for Chinese (Sina Weibo) and English (Twitter) posts are introduced, which can be reused for other semantic analysis tasks. Besides, the authors present a prediction model for the practical participants in the commodity markets and introduce a method to choose between Sina Weibo and Twitter for certain prediction tasks.