People love burgers. People love Twitter (maybe love is too strong a word; perhaps “tolerate”). People also like interesting maps. So why not combine the three into a map of the U.S. showing which burger joints are the subject of the most Tweets in towns around the nation?

That was the notion behind the interactive map created by the folks at PeekAnalytics, who say they looked a month’s worth of Tweets about the nation’s top 20 burger chains and then used the map to indicate which chain was mentioned most frequently in each of 12,000 locations.

Not surprisingly, McDonald’s — the nation’s biggest chain — was the most often Tweeted-about in the largest number of towns:

Followed by Burger King:

But when you actually zoom in on the map to the level of each town, there are some head-scratching results.

For example, here in Philadelphia, home to plenty of national fast food chains and no shortage of Twitter users, the map claims that Culver’s is the chain most referenced in Philly-based Tweets:

This, in spite of the fact that the nearest Culver’s we could find is several hundred miles away in Ohio.

And up in New York City, the map claims that people in The Bronx are apparently obsessed with something called Mooyah, a chain whose nearest location is around 100 miles away. And the Twitter users of Long Island City in Queens can’t stop writing about Jack In the Box, even though the closest JITB eatery is a 500-mile drive:

So it looks like the PeekAnalytics people might want to work on refining this map, which also doesn’t differentiate between positive and negative Tweets. Merely mentioning a name doesn’t mean consumers are fans of that brand.

(via BurgerBusiness.com)

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