can-twitter-predict-american-idol-resultsWe are fresh out the first elimination of American Idol 10, and while a little time ago we posted where to follow each American Idol finalist on Twitter, it kind of hit me.

Can Twitter predict American Idol´s winner? Can Twitter predict American Idol eliminations?

We´ll see. There were 30 million votes last night, but can we use Twitter as a statistics sample of American Idol outcome?

Let´s look at it more. If we take a look at the numbers just by followers

American Idol Finalists ranked by Twitter followers (as of March 10)

1- Scotty McCreery: 22881
2- Paul McDonald: 19602
3- Casey Abrams: 18825
4- Lauren Alaina: 16256
5- Thia Megia: 15700
6- Pia Toscano: 14391
7- James Durbin: 14274
8- Stefano Langone: 12526
9- Jacob Lusk: 9007
10- Karen Rodriguez: 8140
11- Haley Reinhart: 7670
12- Naima Adedapo: 7207
13- Ashton Jones: 5665

We can clearly see Ashton was by far the one with the least following, and eventually the one eliminated. The other two in the danger zone were Haley and Karen that´s number 11 and number 10 in the followers rank. So Naima being safe was the anomally sort of saying.

American Idol Finalists ranking by Tweets

Ashton: 327
Paul: 259
Karen: 178
Lauren: 156
Scotty: 113
Pia: 97
Jacob: 97
Naima: 83
James: 82
Stefano: 44
Thia: 33
Casey: 13
Haley: 5

What do these numbers mean? The bottom three have different tweeting styles. The one with the most updates was eliminated, and the one with the least tweets was bottom three too. Are oversharing and undersharing part of the problem? Maybe, maybe not.

What do I take out from this? It´s more accurate to think that Twitter followers mimic voters, so we could say Scotty, Paul, Casey and Lauren are the frontrunners so far, and that Naima avoided being in the bottom three probably by a statistic margin, and or performance factors.

In conclusion, I think Twitter is a very good measure to see who could get eliminated on American Idol, but you need to lever the weeks´performance to correct the margin.

What do you think? Can Twitter predict American Idol results? What else can it predict?

Let me know in the comments section.

Also, remember to follow me on Twitter for more American Idol scoop.

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