A Study On The Correlation Between Hot Micro - Blog And Box Office

This thesis analyzed the relevance between Weibo buzz of movies and their box office performance in terms of the quantity of mentions, sentiments embedded in the mentions, characteristicof contents and forms of posts. We proved that Weibo buzz of movies during certain times and their box office performance during certain times are highly related by constructing a lot of relevance models between those two. And we also discovered that sentiments are essential to the box office performance.At the very beginning, we introduced the user image and basic characteristics of Weibo, and the status of quo of movie marketing on Weibo. Then we summarized the research fruits on Weibo marketing, and movie marketing on Weibo both in and outside China.In the following, we picked 14 movies that were released in July and August of 2015, and obtained all the mentions of them on Weibo. After brief analysis, we used SPSS 22.0 to construct linear regressions based on the quantity of mentions, sentiments, with or without links, and forms of post or repost, and performed regression analysis from many levels. In the end, we proposed a possible data model on the relevance between the buzz of movies on Weibo and their box office performance, gave out some advice on movie marketing strategies on Weibo, and listed some potential research directions.Main research results of the thesis are as below:1. Mentions on social-media is highly related to the real world performance; and this relevance could be observed from the mentions of movies on Weibo and their box office performance, thus a data model could be constructed between those two;2. The buzz from a week before the release can somehow predict the box office performance on the debut; and the buzz from two weeks after the release is also highly related to the total box office;3. Sentiments on different movies could be used to predict the related box office, but it only works after the release of the movie.4.60% of the buzz created before the release are constructed of posts with links which indicates that massive marketing is relatively important; sometimes a well-produced trailer could decide the performance of the movie debut;5. WOM is key to the box office performance after its release, and this should draw enough attention from the producers and marketers of movies.