#StarWars Opening Weekend: 5 Million Tweets, 140 Million Facebook Interactions

The movie was a huge success on Facebook, as well. The social network announced Monday that more than 64 million people were talking about it on opening weekend, generating 140 million interactions around Star Wars content.

Here’s a look at how discussion about Star Wars on Facebook went global over time.

So far this year (until 9 p.m. ET on Sunday), there have been 18.7 million tweets about Star Wars.

Twitter also showcased the most-used phrases within the Star Wars discussion on the site:

1. spoiler
2. good
3. excited
4. ready
5. best
6. love
7. hype
8. holy
9. amazing
10. great

SocialFlow co-founder Frank Speiser talked with SocialTimes about the way that Star Wars dominated on social more than two other blockbusters this year — Avengers: Age of Ultron and Jurassic World. SocialFlow data shows that the day after release, there were 13 million impressions around stories about Star Wars on Facebook and overall, the film was way more buzzed about than Avengers or Jurassic World.

Speiser discussed the marketing reach of Star Wars:

Star Wars, I think it’s an interesting case compared to the other two. Obviously, there was a big planned press push — the number of posts grew into opening weekend. But it also had organic legs too. People were going to talk about it because that’s what they wanted to talk about. It’s content that I think people sought after. Marketers did a great job of getting it to them.

Interestingly, while Star Wars had a higher percentage of social chatter around news stories posted in the week leading up to release, Jurassic World had a higher percentage of people talking about stories on social in the 3 days after launch.

Synthesio measured what people were talking about with regard to Star Wars online and on social, showing that people loved old characters, but were also very excited about new characters.

As far as the new characters go, most of the social buzz went toward Rey and BB-8.

Discussion around the old characters was a little more evenly split, with Han Solo responsible for the lion’s share:

Twitter’s data shows that director JJ Abrams had high expectations to live up to. He was the most-tweeted about person or character this opening weekend:

1. JJ Abrams
2. Han Solo
3. Darth Vader
4. BB8
5. Luke Skywalker
6. Kylo Ren
7. John Boyega (Finn)
8. Daisy Ridley (Rey)
9. Jar Jar Binks
10. Princess Leia

Readers: Did you enjoy Star Wars: The Force Awakens?