Star Wars: The Force Awakens — Which characters saw the most conversation?

(or maybe, Episode III: The EntSight Strikes Back!)

Amongst the recent wealth of news relating to the latest instalment of Star Wars was the fact that Harrison Ford, who plays the roguish Han Solo in the series, was paid a significant 76 times what newcomers Daisy Ridley and John Boyega were.

Director J.J Abrams has talked about Han Solo as a vital link between the original series and the new so we were interested to understand how conversation about the character, as well as other key players in the new movie, played out on social media and whether this proved the value of Ford/Solo’s role in the film. And don’t worry — we’re keeping this one completely spoiler free too!

Using our social listening tool Brandwatch we analysed conversation from Twitter about these characters from the start of the year, initially dividing them up into two groups — Original Characters and New Characters.

Having built rules and categories to identify relevant conversation we first looked at how this broke down between the two character groups. As you can see from the graph above the original characters saw close to 60% of all conversation, which goes some way to suggest that investing in them was a smart idea.

Drilling down into conversation about individual characters we see that of the original cast Han Solo sees the largest share, followed by Luke Skywalker — a character who despite his popularity was barely seen in The Force Awakens trailers.

Looking at conversation over time we also see that Han Solo (and Chewie) related conversation was very prominent around the time of the first teaser trailer in April, which adds credence to the idea that Harrison Ford was worthy investment when you consider the significant buzz for the movie he helped create here.

So what about the new characters? Well, our insights confirmed that new bad guy Kylo Ren saw the most conversation overall followed by Rey, the films new female lead.

However, when we look at conversation sentiment it looks like adorable new droid BB-8 is seeing the most love from Twitter audiences — something we expect will most likely translate into merchandise sales this Xmas too.

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If you’re interested in learning more about what we offer here at EntSight then please feel welcome to drop us an email

Edward Bass,Co-founder & Director @ EntSight

Twitter: @audiosilver

Linkedin: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ejbass

Image Credit: Disney