Does Twitter chatter matter? Online reviews and box office revenues

With a rapid rise of text-based social media and online Word-of-Mouth (WOM) activity, millions of people express their thoughts and opinions on a variety of topics. Considering that nowadays WOM is a most influential source of information when guiding consumers’ choice and purchase decisions, in this paper we look at the relationship between Twitter messages (tweets) and cinema box office revenues. Using static and dynamic panel data regression approaches, we show that the frequency, sentiment and timing of tweets posted about a film are correlated to different extent with the movie’s box office revenues, with negative tweets being particularly damaging to the box office revenues. From a managerial perspective, this is important to know, such that film production companies and distributors can adjust their strategy accordingly.