UPDATED 20:35 EDT / JUNE 15 2016

NEWS

How Facebook data proves Sony dominated the E3 conversation

This year’s E3 was a full-on battle for attention between some of the world’s biggest technology companies, and according to data gathered by Facebook, it looks like Sony Corp was the clear winner, beating out rivals like Microsoft and Nintendo.

Facebook came to this conclusion after measuring social media conversations about E3 through a partnership with Pulsar, a social media monitoring platform that analyzing Facebook’s aggregated and anonymized data. According to Facebook, Sony’s E3 press event outshone its rivals by a wide margin, capturing an impressive 30 percent share of conversations about E3.

“This really shows that people are talking about games on Facebook,” Rick Kelly, vice president of global gaming at Facebook, told VentureBeat. “It’s exciting to pull those insights together to inform more of the industry.”

The rapid growth of social media over the last decade has fundamentally shifted the way businesses measure consumer sentiment toward their products and services, and tools like Pulsar are becoming an increasingly important way to analyze the social conversations held on Facebook and elsewhere. For example, the Nielsen Company, whose television ratings system has long been used to determine the advertising payout for TV series, has started measuring Facebook conversations to see what shows people are talking about.

“By measuring program-related conversation across social networking services, TV networks and streaming content providers can assess the effectiveness of social audience engagement strategies and better understand the relationship between social activity and tune-in,” Nielsen said in a statement at the time.

Facebook’s data sends a clear message to Sony that whatever it is doing at E3 is working, and this might partly explain why PlayStation 4 is the most popular system out of the current console generation by far, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 million units sold to date.

“PlayStation’s heritage has been built around innovation and ground-breaking gaming experiences, and today’s reveals of new PS4 and PS VR content speaks to our continued commitment to this evolution of gaming,” Shawn Layden, President of Sony Interactive Entertainment America and Chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, said in a recent statement.

If you want to see what all of the fuss was about, you can watch Sony’s full E3 2016 presentation below:

Screenshot via PlayStation | YouTube

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