A 007 statistic of note

On Aug. 20, an item on Nikki Finke’s Deadline Web site caught our eye, namely that the Twilight movies have amassed 1 million followers on Twitter. By late Aug. 21, that was up to 1,005,694. We were curious, so we looked up the official Twitter site for James Bond movies (a latecomer to the whole social media thing). It had 65,381 followers. The Twilight Saga follows 113 other Twitter users while 007 follows 0.

Why would we be interested? Because Twitter has become a big way of marketing movies. It’s another arm of the marketing department. It’s an indicator of what the studios behind movies want to emphasize. It’s also an indicator — albeit one of many — of the relative popularity of movies among a younger demographic that uses Twitter.

Having a gap between The Twilight Saga and the official 007 Twitter feed isn’t a great surprise. The Twilight Saga has been on Twitter since 2009. 007 didn’t go Twitter until November 2011, just ahead of a news conference to kick off the “official” start of Skyfall filming.

We made a note of it on our own modest Twitter feed and on Facebook and didn’t think much more of it. We more reaction than we thought we’d get. People are predicting that the number of 007 followers should go up when Skyfall’s marketing kicks into high gear, others are commenting it’s a sad state of affairs, etc. Does this mean anything? Who knows, but the statistics did draw a reaction.

One note, we’ve mentioned before. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn II, hits U.S. theaters on Nov. 16, one week after Skyfall. The first Twilight film debuted a week after Quantum of Solace in the U.S., and that Bond film saw its ticket sales slide 60 percent. Twilight won’t affect Bond fans making it to the theater. It remains to be seen whether the final Twilight movie could affect Skyfall attendance by film goers who aren’t hard-core 007 fans.

UPDATE I: Our friends at The James Bond Dossier suggested (on Twitter) that we compare the number of followers for both on Facebook, because Twitter users tend to be more tech savy while Facebook has a more general population. As of early Aug. 22, The Twilight Saga has 34,923,544 “likes” while the official 007 page has 1,097,319.