Posts Tagged ‘twitter movie’
Twitter can predict movie success
July 6th, 2010
This story caught my eye the other day over at physorg.com site entitled “Researchers say Twitter algorithm can predict movie profits”
The post goes on to confirm that two social computing scientists at HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., contend that computational models using Twitter feeds can predict, with as much as 97.3 percent accuracy, how a movie will perform on its first weekend of release.
How does it work?
The HP Labs study analysed nearly 3 million Twitter updates that mentioned 24 major releases — “Alice in Wonderland,” “Avatar” and “Twilight: New Moon” — over the course of three months. By factoring in the date of a movie’s release and the number of theatres where it appeared, the researchers predicted opening weekend box-office performance with 97.3 percent accuracy. They also developed a system to evaluate the sentiment of Twitter updates — positive, neutral or negative — to predict the following weekend’s returns with 94 percent accuracy.
Any results?
The researchers’ Twitter-based methodology predicted “Dear John” would garner $30.71 million at the box office on opening weekend. It pulled in $30.46 million. And for “The Crazies,” the methodology predicted $16.8 million, and it earned $16.07 million on opening weekend.
If this is true and this “algorithm” can really predict opening weekend profits, it could potentially also be used for any means of launch including books, magazines, TV series and countless other products.
I’m sure marketeers and advertising executives would fall over themselves for a product like this, helping them fine tune advertising campaigns, and marketing ideas to ring every pound out of the campaign budget and maximise potential profits and success.
Read more about the story here.