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 sax 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 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 performance.