We have all seen a Facebook status or Tweet on twitter about a movie someone has just seen. A users post can range from “just saw XYZ it was pretty good to, XYZ was the worst movie ever.” Millions of people use social networks to see what their friends are doing; get updates on what’s new or the newest gossip and in some cases to see if the movies that are coming out this weekend are any good. In an age where one person can communicate to hundreds of people in seconds is there any correlation to what people say on social networks and box office sales.
Social networks like Twitter and Facebook allow their users to give instant feedback on: movies, albums, T.V. shows, restaurants the list can go and on. Today Twitter has over 200 million users and Facebook over 600 million users and that number is growing daily. According to a thesis called the Effectiveness of WOM (word of mouth) by using Facebook as an Implementation in the Movie Industry, Facebook is the second most popular website only coming behind Google.com. As I stated earlier these social networks and others allow the users to communicate to hundreds of people instantly. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, John Singh who works for the web site Flixter says “Just two years ago, if I saw a movie I loved or I hated, I’d be able to tell a dozen friends, tops, now, I can be walking out of a theater as the credits are rolling and immediately tell 500 people what I thought. … It’s never been this easy to be this influential.” People are more likely to listen to their friends about how good a movie is rather than a movie review online or on T.V. The movie industry is beginning to use social networks more and more to advertize and promote their movies. Marketers find that when they use something like Facebook to increase WOM (word of mouth) communication that people take it as credible and more trustworthy and it is cheaper to advertize on social networks. By using Facebook to promote movies having it being the most frequently used social network where users spend over 700 billion minutes per month can have a huge influence on box office sales.
Today almost every movie that comes out has a Facebook or Twitter page. The people promoting these movies or the movies’ marketers behind these pages will upload pictures, trailers of the movie and sometimes exclusive content. James Cameron the director of the Avatar and his team did most of their promotion online through social networks. After the movie was release in under a month Avatar’s official Facebook page had 700,000 fans and 18,000 followers on Twitter some of which became a part of these pages before the movie even released. MTV uploaded a webcast on Facebook that interviewed the director and some of the actors in the movie. Fans leading up to the interview could email questions for the director and the cast and they would answer them in the interview. The team behind Avatar also broadcast the movie premier live on MySpace. In the end Avatar was a huge hit in the box office and is currently holds the record for the biggest box office domestically and worldwide according to boxofficemojo.com. It is not sure if social networks played a direct effect on how well Avatar did in the box office but it is safe to say that it defiantly help.
One movie that had everyone thinking that social networks directly affected box office sales was Bruno. Bruno was mockumentary about a homosexual Austrian fashion reporter who comes to America after getting fired and basically going around to real people and putting them in uncomfortable and very homosexual situations. According to a Time magazine article online Bruno increased sales from Thursday at midnight to Friday that came out to be 16 million dollars but saw almost a 40% drop in sales on Saturday. Time believes that it saw such a huge drop because of Twitter, that people while they were leaving the theater tweeted how bad the movie was. However 360i a blog online found that 79% of the tweets about Bruno were positive or natural for example someone tweeting just saw Bruno. From what 360i found can it be said that Twitter really caused Bruno to do so bad in the box office or was it just a movie that people did not want to see.
Finally I believe that social networks can help and influence people to go see a certain movie and that the film industry will continue to use these websites to promote their movies. I feel that because Bruno saw such a huge drop in sales in just one day people want to blame Twitter or some type of social network that could reach a multitude of people in such a short time. It is possible that word of mouth did play a part in why it did not do so well but there is no way to tell that Twitter had a direct effect.
