The Social Network, the cinematic account of Mark Zuckerberg’s meteoric rise to power and money as the CEO and founder of Facebook. Of course, like most successes, Zuck has been an overnight success 5-ish years in the making; however, the success of Facebook is anything but trivial. Whatever you say of the movie and its factual (in)accuracies, one thing that can’t be denied is the amount of social media buzz about “The Social Network.” This is not surprising; I’d be very surprised if social media didn’t care about a movie about social media. That wouldn’t be good.
Although the movie opened this past Friday, various members of the social media community have been viewing sneak previews long before the opening date. I myself had a chance to see it last week, hosted by the Mashable team. There was certainly enough buzz driven by theatrical trailers, early reviews and sneak previews, and although there was enough buzz prior to the release, I wanted to wait until after this weekend to get a read on social media data.
As you can see, there were 3 rather large spikes in buzz, the largest one being the theatrical release (above). Zeroing in on the last 30 days, 10/1, the release date, was responsible for 6,300 social media mentions in just one day!
Where did these conversations take place? Looking at the content distribution chart below, it looks like discussion forums grabbed the spotlight. This actually makes a ton of sense, since the Attensity360 system reads and analyzes Facebook notes, forums and pages (anything publicly available, basically) under the “discussion forum” data source. Looks like people were talking about the Facebook movie on Facebook!
It makes sense that discussion forums and blogs led the discussion; however, how was Twitter buzz comparatively low? My guess is that people who saw the movie in advance weren’t allowed to tweet (I know we weren’t during the screening — I assume it was the case in all the screenings), and thus tweets would have to skew towards the opening day on the trend line. Take a look below: my theory turned out to be correct! This is why I say context is really important to know when looking at numbers.
How did people feel about the movie? Considering sentiment across all the sources, it was overwhelmingly positive (see below)!
