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Nicholas to win X Factor final predicts Twitter, Tweview & Coup Media

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By The Drum, Editorial

December 13, 2013 | 5 min read

The biggest TV event of the year is happening this weekend - the live X Factor final. But thanks to Twitter Paul Shepherd, managing director of Coup Media, already knows the outcome as he explains here.

Own up, who's watching the X Factor final this Sunday? I will be - not because my wife and kids 'make me' (so many of my mates use that excuse), but because I want to see whether ‘Tweview X Factor’ (the predictor app we built atop Brandwatch's excellent api) can maintain it's 100% accuracy until the end of the X Factor season.

A bit of context for you. Tweview is a system that analyses tweet volume and sentiment to generate a 'Tweview Score' for products and services (films, banks, games, insurance), and it's set to launch proper in Q1 next year. So to drum up a little recognition and PR we built Tweview X Factor to see if we could predict the weekly losers and subsequent, eventual, overall winner. The results have surprised even us, but it could all go horribly wrong in one blog post!

During the live shows so far we've correctly predicted the bottom two contestants (based either on twitter sentiment or tweet volume) every week. Those contestants go into the Sunday 'sing off', with one of those acts eliminated. And guess what? The act sat rock bottom of our weekly Tweview table is invariably the act to be eliminated! So far!

They say a picture paints a thousand words so our friends over at Coup Media created the infographic below to represent our key findings, but before you skip to the good bit, I think there's a wider trend to be recognised in all of this. I think that apps like Tweview, Zeebox, Get Glue, Peel and Twitter as a whole create an excellent second screen experience but I also think that there will be another step very soon.

We can't be far away from Twitter defined endings to drama serials, or social camera views where the public choose what they want to see when. I know that there have been steps in this direction already - predictably from the US networks - but how long before TV goes truly social - and what does truly social mean?

At the risk of sounding like a cop out, I'm not sure we'll really know until we see it, so new is this whole 'crowd sourced production' space. One thing is for sure though, TV's domination of the living room feels like it's about to change. But that's not to say it's on the wane. If anything the emergence of the real second screen, video and TV on demand will afford even more power to the first - and original - screen. I guess that TV has just the X Factor!

Back to the stats and we're offering up the young Scot, Nicholas McDonald as our champion elect based on what Tweview has told us. Over the live shows, the baby faced crooner has been top of the Tweview table for 9 weeks, and peaked at a positive sentiment level of 95%.

That said, of the three remaining finalists, Nicholas has the lowest volume of tweets to his name as it stands (16k versus Sam's 26k and Luke's 28k). The question remains then, will tweets convert to calls and votes. If they do then Nicholas is in trouble (and so are we!), but we're going to back the data and stick with Nicholas McDonald, winner of the X Factor 2013.

Now, I wonder who'll be Christmas No.1!

Paul Shepherd is the founder and managing director of social media agency Coup Media.

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