It’s a pretty safe bet to assume that many Canadians (this writer included) are looking forward to the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens this weekend, especially with reviews now indicating the excitement might actually be justified.
Even the business world has taken notice, with Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC owner the Walt Disney Company’s stock recently soaring thanks to reviews.
But while plenty has been written about just how well Disney’s $4 billion purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012 is paying off, the tech industry might find it even more interesting to know just how well the film has trended across social media, with Salesforce breaking it down in a fascinating slideshow measuring the number of times the Star Wars universe was mentioned on social media between Dec. 7 and Dec. 14.
The largest number, by far, was the number of Twitter impressions – 4.1 billion over the seven-day period. Star Wars was also mentioned in more than one million posts (1,037,765 to be exact) – a 78.1 per cent increase from the previous week (indicating the posts were more likely to be related to The Force Awakens than, say, BioWare’s latest update of Star Wars: The Old Republic).
Disney partnered with seven brands to promote the film (including HP), and between them the movie has been mentioned 10,300 times, leading to a collective 396 million Twitter impressions over the seven-day period, an increase of 4.5 per cent over the previous week.
Among the brands, HP ranked third in number of mentions, with 1100, while U.S. phone carrier Verizon Wireless (5,600 mentions) was discussed the most thanks to #TheoryWars, its social media campaign inviting people to share their favourite fan theories for a chance to win tickets to the movie. #TheoryWars itself generated 120 million Twitter impressions during seven-day period.
Star Wars also completely dominated the social media conversation regarding the top five movie releases in December (which were rounded out by Wall Street docudrama The Big Short; Christmas-themed horror comedy Krampus; Ron Howard’s dramatization of the real-life story that inspired Moby-Dick, In The Heart of the Sea; and the latest from Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight), accounting for 93.6 per cent of the topic’s mentions on Twitter and 91.6 per cent of volume overall.
(It’s also worth noting that “Star Wars” was one of the most searched terms on Google this year, both globally and in Canada, with more than 155 million searches worldwide).
And the top Star Wars hashtags? #StarWars, with 227,000 uses, and #TheForceAwakens, with 109,000 uses.
Here’s the slidedeck from Salesforce:
