Did Social Media Predict The Grammys?

The short answer: "Social Media Is No Nate Silver" -- unless hindsight bias rules your analysis.

How well did social media do at predicting the winners of the 55th Grammy Awards? The infographic to the left (click on it to see it bigger) includes some answers, thanks to Mashable. It shows SM data as of Feb 7th and the Grammys were aired the evening of Feb 10th.

So how did SM do at predicting the winners?

For Best New Artist, Facebook predicted the winner, but Twitter and Instagram did not.

For Song of the Year, YouTube's second most played tune was the winner. But note that several non-nominees got more play than nominees, esp. outlier Psy and brushed-off Bieber.

For Record of the Year, song plays on YouTube picked the winner decisively, but Facebook and Twitter stats did not.

For Album of the Year, the number of Facebook followers chose the winner decisively, but Twitter did not.

Analysis: While it appears from this infographic that Facebook and YouTube did predict a couple of winners, before the event you'd not have been able to know which of several social media would be the best predictors.

The big point to keep in mind here is that social media is playing off-key anyway: We probably should not expect SM to predict the Grammys, given that the judges use different criteria than popular opinion.

For a markedly more comprehensive analysis of this question, see "Digital Notes: The Scorecard on Social Media's Grammy Predictions."

To view the all of the nominees and results visit The Grammys website.

### --Bill Paarlberg, editor