Here's a prediction: we are about to see Hollywood embark on mass twitter marketing campaigns. And you can bet it will be abused. Get ready for mass Twitter spam.
That's my conclusion after reading this report in Fast Company where two researchers at HP Labs, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, discovered that you can actually use Twitter mentions to predict how well a movie will do in its first couple weekends of release.
They built a computer model, which factored in two variables: the rate of tweets around the release date and the number of theatres it was released in. That was 97.3% accurate. Then they put up another model where they compiled a ratio of positive tweets to negative tweets. That was 94% accurate.
As reported here, the movie Transylmania, which opened in December had the lowest tweet-rates of all the 24 movies considered. "For the week prior to its release," the pair report, "it received on an average 2.75 tweets per hour." The movie was such a dog that it set a record for the lowest-grossing opening and was pulled from cinemas at the end of the second week. By comparison the study found that Avatar, which made $77 million on its opening weekend, and Twilight: New Moon, which grossed $142 million on its opening weekend, both had high tweet rates in the week prior to their release. Twilight: New Moon averaged 1,365.8 tweets per hour and Avatar averaged 1,212.8 tweets per hour.
It's fascinating but I would add one caveat: it's not going to work for every film. It will work well for big budget releases but don't expect it to do anything for cheaper films that won't have the same sort of distribution and would therefore be less exposed to tweets.
With the New York Times telling us that studios are now using Facebook and other viral marketing techniques to push films, you can bet they'll be hitting Twitter. And that's dangerous.
As the Techdirt site says, tweets might not only indicate interest in a movie. They could also influence a movie's sales. "If it becomes common practice to predict box office success by analyzing Twitter, the incentive to exploit this by spamming Twitter with tweets about an upcoming movie increases greatly. After all, the many predictions that foretold that Avatar would break box office records certainly played a self-fulfilling part in its breaking of those box office records."
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