In honor of Halloween today, the some of the uberVU team in our Cambridge, MA, USA office decided to pit our favorite Halloween candies against each other in an all-out, to-the-death, full-blown Social Media Face Off. Of the three candies our team members selected, Candy Corn got the most social media buzz in the month of October, but also the most controversial treat we tested.

Before we dive into the data, let’s meet the contenders:

Gregg Poulin, CMO of uberVU	Candy Corn
Matt Cordaro, uberVU’s Director of Client Services	Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups
Elisabeth Michaud, uberVU Community Manager	Kit-Kat Bars

So, what did we find out about our three favorite Halloween candies? To find our “winner”, we set up search streams in the uberVU platform for each type of candy, including variations in spacing, plurality and punctuation (e.g. including both “kit kat” and “kit-kats”) and removing any obvious unrelated terms. We built a report showing data for the month of October (October 1st – 30th, for the purposes of writing this blog post) to capture any mentions of these candies as people geared up for the Halloween festivities today. We checked out all global mentions of the three types of candy in all languages.

Two-sentence social media case study: As uberVU’s community manager, I could easily have been doing this for my company’s brand and comparing it to our company’s major competitors to see whether we’re measuring up to them in social media. For this particular blog post, however, I wanted all the fun and games of Halloween candy instead!

After quickly setting up a report earlier (it took me about 10 minutes to pull in the data points I wanted and customize the time frame for each field), I checked out the data yesterday, October 30th, to see whose favorite candy won.

Here’s the breakdown:

The winner: Candy Corn

• Candy Corn had the overall highest number of social media mentions (88,296) compared to the other two candies (16,127 for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and 7,567 for Kit Kats)
• It also blew the other two out of the water when it came to social sharing: 722 shares for Candy Corn vs. 91 for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and 97 for Kit Kats
• Day-by-day, candy corn was got the most social media buzz, too (though Kit Kats sure made a comeback towards the end of the month):
  
• Both candy corn and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups have been mentioned most often in conjunction with Halloween, while Kit Kats are being discussed most often alongside the word “chocolate” (based on the tag clouds for each type of candy). Sounds like Kit Kats are popular to satisfy chocolate cravings, but less so for those thinking about ghosts, ghouls, jack-o-lanterns and trick-or-treating.
• While candy corn got the most social media buzz overall, when we look at how the sentiment around each type of candy falls, we see that it was also the candy with the highest proportion of negative sentiment (almost a full quarter of the candy corn-related mentions were negative, while both Reese’s and Kit Kat had less than 20% negative mentions)
  

And so, by pure volume of social media mentions, we have to declare candy corn the winner of our first Social Media Face Off.

While Reese’s cups and Kit Kat bars may be less-controversial Halloween treats, they can’t beat the overall reach of those sweet little kernels (Blogger’s note: personally, I can’t eat more than 3 without getting a toothache, but that’s just me! Kit Kat bars are just so much crunchier, crispier, and, of course, chocolatier. Mmmmmmm…..Well, anyway). Congrats, candy corn (and Gregg, for picking the most popular sweet treat)!

If you’re interested in learning more about the uberVU platform’s Analytics capabilities, check out this page or read a blog post about our recently relaunched product.

Now, tell us what your favorite Halloween candy is! Tweet it to @ubervu or comment below. We can’t wait to hear what you think of our choices!

Candy corn image credit: The Culinary Geek
Kit-Kat image credit: Schoko-Riegel
Reese’s image credit: owlpacino

Tagged as: candy corn, Halloween, Kit Kat bars, Reese's cups, social media data, social media face off, social media monitoring, uberVU