Can Social Media Buzz predict the Oscars? We’re about to find out!

Social media buzz is something we frequently analyse and work on generating for the movies we help market. But can it predict one of the film industry’s most prestigious awards?
Voting closed yesterday (Tuesday, 27 February) and the Oscars are upon us! On March 4th there will be some very happy folk holding onto mini gold statuettes- and a lot of smiling, (hopefully) graceful losers.
This year we have decided to give another try to predicting the winners of a couple of categories. Over the next days we will post our predictions for Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film based on social media buzz. We believe that each year the social presence and reach of a film will begin to be a direct marker of Oscar success, as producers will look to tap into the power of online chatter to sway Academy voters.
And the nominees are…

How will we measure social media buzz? Our analysis will span the social media buzz generated by these movies across three of the most popular social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
We expect much of the chatter to come from North America. However, we use various search terms to account for the global popularity of these titles.
Facebook page likes, Twitter and Instagram followers will be weighed in our experiment. Will will complete the picture with a couple of other things to help assess social media buzz.
To account for the USA weighing heavier in the debate (as the Oscars are awarded by the US Academy), we will also look at the total audience reach on Facebook in this territory. We will measure this with the Gruvi Audience Calculator using interests in the movie, as well as the directors and stars.
The other tool we are using is Brandwatch. This where the social media buzz is really buzzing! It allows us to measure the volume of mentions for a particular title- as well as its director and main cast members. The analysis will include hashtags related to the movie, as used in both Twitter and Instagram posts. The Brandwatch platform will also provide us with a measure of sentiment. We will be looking at mentions expressing both positive and negative sentiment.
All of these elements will be scored using the highest value in each of the categories as a reference point. We will then create a weighted average of these indexed scores to decide which of the movies has generate the most social media buzz.
Key performance indicators Here are the (KPIs) we will include in our analysis:

• Facebook page ‘Likes’;
• Facebook Reach (based on the Gruvi Audience Calculator)
• Instagram followers;
• Twitter followers;
• Number of social media mentions in the past 31 days (across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter);
• Sentiment;
• Unique authors (how many individual accounts the mentions Brandwatch detects come from).

Find out who social media will award Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film in the next days. On Sunday we’ll find out if the social media buzz got all the way to the ears of Academy voters! If you would like to know more CONTACT US