Researchers at HP Labs discover that Twitter can predict, with astonishing accuracy, how well a movie will sell.

Original Article is from Fast Company

“Asur and Huberman started by monitoring movie mentions in 2.9 million tweets from 1.2 million users over three months. These included 24 movies in all, ranging from Avatar to Twilight: New Moon.

Then they took two different approaches, dealing with two very different performance metrics: the first weekend performance, which is largely built on buzz and the second weekend performance, which is largely built whether people actually like the movie.

To predict first weekend performance, they built a computer model, which factored in two variables: the rate of tweets around the release date and the number of theaters its released in. Lo and behold, that model was 97.3% accurate in predicting opening weekend box office. By contrast, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, which has been the gold standard for opening box-office predictions, had a 96.5% accuracy. “

But what should be even more alluring to marketers: As Tech Review points out, Twitter might be more than just a mirror of mass sentiment - the service might also influence it. In other words, could you actually make a product launch far more successful with a really smart Twitter strategy?