Forecasting movie revenues with Twitter. Marketers are keenly interested in how social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) may influence consumers who buy their products.

Researchers at HP Labs (Palo Alto, CA) investigated whether the volume of chatter on Twitter.

com could be used to forecast the box office revenues LO9 of movies (IEEE International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, 2010).

Opening weekend box office revenue data (in millions of dollars) were collected for a sample of 24 recent movies. In addition, the researchers computed each movie’s tweet rate, i.e., the average number of tweets (at Twitter.com) referring to the movie per hour one week prior to the movie’s release. The data (simulated based on information provided in the study) are listed in the table. Assuming that movie revenue and tweet rate are linearly related, how much do you estimate a movie’s opening weekend revenue to change as the tweet rate for the movie increases by an average of 100 tweets per hour?

Tweet Rate Revenue (millions)
1365.8 142 1212.8 77 581.5 61 310.1 32 455 31 290 30 250 21 680.5 18 150 18 164.5 17 113.9 16 144.5 15 418 14 98 14 100.8 12 115.4 11 74.4 10 87.5 9 127.6 9 52.2 9 144.1 8 41.3 2 2.75 0.3