Twitter goes to the movies
I have previously noted that researchers have used Twitter trends to predict outbreaks of colds and flu, and also to provide up to date weather maps. Now researchers have turned their hand to movies. Could Twitter analysis be used to predict box office success?
Researchers from Princeton looked at fifteen million tweets which had mentioned any of the 34 movies which were in line for Oscars, analysing them to see whether the twitterers were giving positive or negative reactions to the films, and seeing how that correlated with box office figures. They also conducted a similar analysis on the reviews posted to IMDB.
In short, the researchers found that tweets which were positive about the films tended to greatly outnumber negative reviews, and that Twitter comments tended to be gentler than the often harsh reviews found in other places such as IMDB. However, they found only a weak correlation between positive tweets posted before the movie was released and the eventual box office success.
This is the exact opposite of the result found by Hewlett Packard researchers just one year earlier, who analysed three million tweets and concluded that tweets could be used before a film opens to accurately predict its future takings. However, rather than simply measure quality of tweet (known as Sentiment Analysis), the HP team's algorithms were also taking into account factors such as speed and frequency of tweeting. Dr Huberman who led the research gave some concrete examples. The system predicted that The Crazies would take $16.8m in its first weekend in the US. It actually took $16.06m. The team also forecast that Dear John would take $30.71m in its first US weekend. It took $30.46m. These are impressively good results.
These studies show that social media has huge potential to provide new insights into our mass population behaviour, but the academic basis for this still needs more work.
26th April 2012