Team Jacob vs. Team Edward

Unless you’ve been living in a coffin for the past few years, you’ve heard the buzz about Twilight.  In the latest movies, small town heroine Bella finds herself being wooed by both a vampire named Edward and a werewolf named Jacob.  Fans are split between which creature she should end up with, and have divided themselves into two camps: Team Edward and Team Jacob.

At Groupable, we’ve developed a wide variety of procedures to measure how groups organize, aggregate, and communicate.  We’ve used these metrics to help sponsors identify everything from top Moms groups to top BBQ groups.  We decided to undertake our greatest challenge to date: settling the raging question of Team Edward vs. Team Jacob.

Challenge #1: Twitter Influence

We found hundreds of Jacob and Edward fan clubs in dozens of countries.  To best make sense of this, we located hundreds of groups who definitively self-identified as boosters of Jacob or Edward (excluding individuals or fans of the actors).  We ran these through our public influence calculator, available at http://influence.groupable.com/, which selected the top twenty Jacob and top twenty Edward accounts.

The comparison of the top twenty accounts are graphed below, with the Groupable Influence Score displayed on the y-axis (100 representing highest).  The first place twitter accounts on the charts are on the left.

	Edward	Jacob
Highest Score	98	77
Lowest Score	36	47
Average Score	59.6	59.7
Median Score	54	59

The results here are inconclusive.  The top Team Edwards accounts are more influential than the top Team Jacob accounts, but exhibit a quick dropoff in quality after the top ten.  The rank and file Team Jacob fan tends to be more influential.  We give the slight edge to Team Edward for commanding the most influence at the top.

Challenge #2: Sentiment Analysis

For this challenge, we looked into what people were actually saying about the two camps.  We sampled conversations about Team Edward and Team Jacob from Twitter, Facebook, podcasts, video sites, and blogs.  The first thing we measured was the volume of people who declared support for Team Jacob or Team Edward:

This came out as a slight win for Team Jacob, with 56% of people pledging support for Team Jacob over 44% in favor of Team Edward.  When we dug a bit deeper, we did see some bad news for Team Jacob.  Our analytics engine measured the sentiment surrounding each conversation, to determine how positive or negative people felt about the various teams:

As you can see above, although Team Jacob had more supporters, he also had more enemies.  Many more people spoke out against Jacob, especially rabid Edward fans.  Sentiment towards Team Edward was smaller, but 95% of mentions were positive, while sentiment towards Team Jacob was larger, but only 88% of mentions were positive.

We interpret this as a slight win for Team Jacob, since he garnered the most vote share, love him or hate him.

Challenge #3: Facebook Influence

On Facebook, we saw a clear win for Team Jacob.  As of the time this study was published, 155,174 people joined the Team Jacob fan page, while just 60,363 joined the Team Edward fan page.

Though the Team Edward fans were marginally more likely to be influencers among their community (by a slim 52-48 margin), they got drowned out by the sheer numbers.  Big edge to Team Jacob.

Conclusion:

We pitted Jacob against Edward in three social media challenges, based on our sponsor’s analytics platform.  At the end of the three rounds, we found Team Jacob prevailed.  Although Team Edwards had slightly more influence in the Twitterverse, Team Jacob had the most raw support across different platforms.  Love him or hate him, he’s the hot topic right now.