A brand-new crystal ball: Research shows how Twitter can predict the future
Published April 06, 2010
Careful analysis of social media content can be used to predict future real-world behavior, according to the results of a study of Twitter tweets and the box office success of Hollywood movies performed by researchers at HP labs.
The researchers, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A. Huberman, assert in the introduction to their report that "we discovered that the rate at which movie tweets are generated can be used to build a powerful model for predicting movie box-office revenue. Moreover our predictions are consistently better than those produced by an information market such as the Hollywood Stock Exchange, the gold standard in the industry."
While the study focused on correlating tweets to the box office success, the researchers say that their findings could well be replicated by other social media services and other industries. The math is complicated, but the message is clear - more attention made for more ticket sales. These types of results also indicate how digital marketing professionals can use data analytics and predictive modeling to work together to build powerful integrated marketing solutions.