As the interest heats up in understanding the business value of social media, there’s an interesting report out from HP Labs that shows the predictive forecasting potential of Twitter.
Sitaram Asur and Beranardo Huberman built two models to predict the box office sales of movies based on Twitter. The model for predicting first weekend box office sales was 97.3 percent accuraate and the prediction for second weekend performance was 94 percent accurate.
From meetings I’ve had recently with marketing scientists I’m convinced that we’ll be seeing many more mathematical models that will not only help quantitatively measure the return on social media engagement but will also link those measures to business metrics like sales, trial, leads.
MIT’s “Technology Review” article about these Twitter models raises an interesting question:
Can they change the demand for their film, product or service buy directly influencing the rate at which people tweet about it? In other words, can they change the future that tweeters predict?
To download the “Predicting the Future with Social Media” study click here.