Influence of social media on performance of movies

Abstract

The performance of movies in terms of revenue depends on many factors such as its production studio, genre, script quality, pre-release promotion etc, - all of which are traditionally used to estimate their potential success at the box office. Recently however, the “Wisdom of Crowd” and social media have been acknowledged as a strong signal in understanding consumer behavior towards media. In this paper, we discuss the impact of socially generated meta-data mined from the social multimedia sites and study the influence of social media on box- office performance and profitability of movies. Our result shows that various social media signals have varying yet significant impact in predicting the performance of movies. Our research also reveals that popularity of actor captured by follower count on Twitter is most relevant to the success of movie at theaters, and Facebook `like' signal has noise which impedes its analytical credibility.