In the world of Social Media Monitoring, people often make the mistake of blindly assuming that buzz means business. While it’s often true that the size of a brand correlates with the amount of online mentions it gets, there’s typically a lot more to it than that.

However, what about when it comes to contestants of a talent show that are voted for by the general public – shouldn’t online buzz more or less correlate with the number of votes? Compared to the actual business value of an online mention, there are surely far fewer variables that differentiate an online mention of a contestant from a vote for that contestant.

Britain’s Got Talent Buzz Chart

With just one Semi-Final left to go before tomorrow’s Grand Final of this year’s Britain’s Got Talent, we collected all mentions of each finalist through so far (mentioned in relation to BGT). So here’s who’s winning the social media vote:

So, of the 8 Finalists through so far (2 more will go through tonight) it looks like a runaway victory for the young singer Ronan Parke…

The Bookies

To see how our findings compare with the odds being offered at the moment, we took a look at Bet365’s odds for the same 8 finalists (accurate as of 3.30pm, June 3rd):

Ronan Parke comes up again as the clear favourite, with the bookies giving Britain’s answer to Justin Bieber more than a 50% chance of taking the final prize.

Limitations

Comparing the odds with the buzz chart, there are two striking differences: Jean Martyn and Steven Hall. Our chart shows that the two most, eh hem, mature contestants, stole more conversation than all the rest bar Parke, while the bookmakers give them amongst the slimmest chances of victory.

So, assuming for now the bookies are right, why the variations? Possible reasons:

• Minor differences in buzz: Compared with the gap between Ronan Parke and the rest (over 2000 mentions), there really isn’t much between Jean Martyn, 2nd, and Les Gibson, 8th, (just 1200 mentions) – this could mean that these particular rankings shouldn’t be read into too much unless there is a major standout like Parke.
• Bad buzz: It’s entirely possible that the conversations about Jean and Steven were actually expressing negativity towards them, or even a degree of mockery (if it’s possible that people could be so mean…).
• Off-line voters: Of course, not everyone that votes will be talking about their favourite contestant online – while we would expect them to correlate to a certain extent, it may be that the voters who aren’t chatting online have a particular type of favourite. (In our AV Referendum predictions we saw a very different situation online compared to the outcome.)

Most Talked About Finalist From Each Semi-Final:

The below graph shows us when exactly each contestant got the most mentions.

By looking at each peak, we can see which of the two contestants that made it through each semi-final won the buzz-war that night:

SF 1: Ronan Parke
SF 2: Jean Martyn
SF 3: Les Gibson
SF 4: Steven Hall

We can also see who was talked about and then forgotten, as it seems Les Gibson was, and who has seen a more consistent level of chatter like Ronane Parke and Jai McDowall.

The Outcome?

It will certainly be interesting to see how the results compare with ours and the bookies’ predictions come next week. Could Steven Hall or Jean Martyn be worth a flutter? Maybe, just maybe, Social Media knows something the bookies don’t…