Kinect Launch: 1 Million Units Sold, 276,000 Tweets

Microsoft’s Kinect for XBox 360 has been making news this week with impressive early sales numbers. The company anounced over 1 million units solid in the first 10 days on the market, a strong start heading into the holiday season with the hot gaming device. Kinect has been in the spotlight on the social media front as well, and naturally, we’ve been tracking the conversation on Twitter and Facebook. Here are the basics from the Kinect launch:

Since launch, there have been an average of ~25K tweets/day and ~15K public Facebook posts/day mentioning Kinect. The peak was on the launch day with more than 46K tweets and 25K public Facebook posts. If we compare this to our mobile phone data from last week, we see that Kinect scores strong marks on the posts per units sold metric (can we start a new FLA for this? PPUSs?). With ~0.43 posts/unit, the Kinect buzz relative to sales ratio is similar to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7. On Twitter specifically, Kinect saw ~0.28 posts/unit sold. It appears that Microsoft’s recent product launches have been effective at garnering consumer attention in social media. I’m sure the Apple fanboys will note that this is still a fraction of the volume generated by Apple products (we saw the iPhone at >1.1 posts/unit sold). But iPhone has a much larger installed base already talking. This appears to be a very strong launch for Microsoft on all fronts.

• Posted on November 16, 2010 by Adam Schoenfeld
• Categories: Social Media, Tech