Social Data Joins The Dark Side

Star Wars Episode VII: The Last Jedi is starting to hit theatres globally, critics have already seen it and people are taking to social media to speak their mind about arguably the year’s most anticipated movie. As the resident crazy Star Wars fan, I decided to follow up on my blog post about what Social Data was saying about Star Wars: The Force Awakens a couple of years ago, with a new post for The Last Jedi.

What I found sent a major tremor through the force, especially as a light-loving fan of the Jedi like myself, it seems that in just about every category I could find, Social Data was trending more favorably towards Kylo Ren (aka this trilogy’s Darth Vader) more than anyone else. In other words, according to Social Data, people like the bad guy more than the good guys!

The graphic above is organized by percentage of share of voice (the percentage of online conversations about Star Wars: The Last Jedi, that mentioned the specific character listed), however, the share of voice alone doesn’t tell the complete story.

If I were just looking at the share of voice, I’d think that Rey and Luke were leading Social Data to the light, however, that’s just not the case. The sentiment around each character, tells a different story altogether. People were most positive about their online mentions about Kylo Ren than they were about any other character. Posts like this one show just how excited people were about Kylo Ren, and how much they enjoyed seeing him:

When you take the sentiment into account, you start looking at Social Data like Synthesio’s Social Reputation Score, which is a proprietary bit of Social Data that comes out of an algorithm that takes the volume of mentions along with the sentiment of the mentions and combines it to give you a score of 0-100. This is perhaps the best measurement in the industry for how people actually feel about different topics (or in this case characters) when compared against each other.

As you can see, the love that people have for the Kylo Ren character is why Kylo Ren’s SRS score of 58.02 was the best among the top 5 characters (by share of voice) in The Last Jedi. So while I would have loved to have seen that the Social Data proved that people love the Jedi the best, it seems that I can’t dispute the fact that Kylo Ren is the most popular character on Social Media.

Want to learn more about how you can use SRS to find out how people feel about your brand in comparison with your competitors, download our free Social Reputation Score eGuide today!