Hot topics that led the social hype for #ForceFriday

September 11 2015

By @G_Parsons33

Published in Analysis

Last Friday was Force Friday, the day merchandise for the new Star Wars movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens officially hit the shelves. Fans were expecting a show, and Disney didn’t disappoint: the arrival of the new toys was celebrated with a live global unboxing event filmed from 15 locations over the course of 18 hours, culminating in the opening of stores worldwide at midnight.

The event generated huge amounts of excitement, and tweets. We used Visibrain to analyze the 253,154 tweets posted between September 3rd and September 5th using the #ForceFriday hashtag to determine what fans were tweeting about the most.

The power of the preview

The Star Wars fan base is huge, so it comes as no surprise that #ForceFriday attracted a lot of attention. If we look at the volume graph for overall activity around the #ForceFriday hashtag below, we can see that the hype built steadily over the days leading up to the event, peaking sharply on Friday September 4th (times shown in Etc/GMT -4).

Overview of the Twitter stream timeline for Forcefriday

If we look at the Twitter volume graph we can see that the number of tweets started to rise significantly on September 3rd, as the string of live unboxing events went live around the world. The link to the video on Youtube was the third most shared of the event, retweeted 3,007 times.

The number of times the link to the live-stream of the product unboxing was shared on Twitter

A new product was unveiled at each of the 15 filming locations, and it didn’t take long for tweeters to pick their favorites.

Star products that stole the show

The most-retweeted links posted during the global unboxing event show that the most popular products were the BB-8 app-controlled droid and the remote-controlled Millennium Falcon drone. The custom #TheForceAwakens emoticon also got a lot of retweets.

The most retweeted links during the unboxing live-stream

The BB-8 was clearly a winner with fans. If we focus on Twitter activity around the droid, it appears in the top five most commonly used hashtags: #bb8 was used 13,583 times between September 3rd and September 5th.

The top hashtags used in tweets about forcefriday

If we filter on expressions the most commonly used in tweets containing the #bb8 hashtag, we get an idea of just how impressed fans were with the new toy: “great” features in the list of the top ten expressions and “coolest starwars toys”, “best thing” and “cutest thing” also stand out in the word cloud.

Top expressions used in tweets with the bb8 hashtag

A closer look at the Twitter stream timeline for the #bb8 hashtag reveals that the product got a huge boost in mentions thanks to a tweet from Good Morning America @GMA, posted at 4.44 pm on September 3rd :

The video content was a big hit, causing a spike in tweet volume as fans rushed to share:

A tweet volume graph for tweets using the bb8 hashtag

The hype around the BB-8 shows that unsurprisingly, #ForceFriday was all about the merchandise.

A movie overshadowed by merchandise

If we look at the top tweets for #ForceFriday, we can see that the new toys up for grabs were on everyone’s minds. The top two most-retweeted posts were from Regal Cinemas @RegalMovies and Funko @OriginalFunko, both of which had organized competitions offering free Star Wars products (including the coveted BB-8) in exchange for retweets and follows.

The most retweeted posts for forcefriday

Star Wars: The Force Awakens may well have been the theme for #ForceFriday, but the new movie was definitely not what got fans tweeting the most. If we filter on the keywords “movie”, “film” and “trailer”, we can see that out of the 250,000 + tweets posted, only 1,165 tweets match.

Tweets about the new Star Wars movie

A few fans did post messages expressing disappointment at not having been able to find out more about the movie however:

Content was most definitely king for #ForceFriday: the event owed its social media success to generating maximum anticipation and giving hardcore fans exclusive previews into the exciting new products being released prior to the arrival of the new movie.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is being released in December this year, so we can expect to see it in our Twitter streams again in the months to come.

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Published in Analysis