What Love Island Can Teach Us About Building a Business Strategy
How fan tweets can be leveraged as consumer feedback to produce a better reality show
Drama, swimsuits, betrayal, and British slang — there is truly no greater pastime than kicking it back after a long day and binge-watching a season of Love Island. Season 8 had 49 episodes featuring some of the UK’s hottest singles and some of the most iconic moments in reality TV history. If I have my math(s) right, I spent almost 2500 minutes these last few weeks watching the latest season on Hulu, and my only regret is not watching it live with the rest of the world over the summer. After all, half the fun is hopping on Twitter during the episode to see hilarious reaction tweets like this one:
Thankfully, my FOMO was short-lived when I found this data set “Thousand #LoveIsland Tweets.” I probably could have watched a whole other season of the show twice over before I got through reading them all, but instead, I saved hours of reading by throwing the dataset into the Sentiment + Topic narrative on the Resultid app. Using this narrative, not only was I able to learn which Love Island moments got people talking on Twitter, I was also able to see which moments fans loved and which moments they absolutely hated. We know people usually use this narrative to understand reviews to learn what people are saying about their company or product and why, but as a reality TV super-fan, I think it’s only fitting that I use this app to delve deeper into Love Island fan content. After all, you have to love how a business app can feed into my reality TV addiction 🤩
It only took a few minutes to run the dataset and learn which Love Island moments were most talked about on Twitter during its prime run over the summer. For example, it was extremely validating to learn that the rest of the world loved Ekin Su and Davide as a couple as much as I do, and were also equally as outraged when Tasha and Andrew got back together.
What is very interesting (and saves me a lot of time reviewing) is the summary that the app produces! The feature organizes the tweets from real viewers of Love Island into positive, negative, and neutral sentiments, and then finds the main themes within those categories. Taking it a step further, the summary output gives us insight on how showrunners could use fan tweets as customer feedback to build a better business strategy for future seasons. For example, the above image shows the main 20 themes within 1023 reviews with positive sentiment, PLUS a summary on how Love Island can use these positive reviews to improve the show. Resultid determined that viewers value interactivity and creating an immersive entertainment experience, which Love Island often does by allowing viewers to vote on their favorite couples and decide who could go home throughout the season. The positive results give us insight into what viewers like about the show (interactivity, learning more about the cast, etc) so that Love Island can use this information and continue to capitalize on and expand on it in the future. All in a few minutes, which is faster than it took Ekin-Su to confess to Davide about her balcony sneak-aways with Jay 🫢
Neutral and negative tweets are bitter pills to swallow, but a necessary evil nonetheless 😔The neutral comments showed that the surprising return of bombshell Adam Collard from previous seasons was truly one of the most talked about moments of the season 🤯💣Love him or hate him, based on these tweets bringing back former contestants to the show would create a sense of nostalgia for viewers.
Additionally, a significant theme in the negative feedback was unethical producer involvement in the show. Reality TV can certainly get dicey, and there’s a fine line between creating entertaining drama and upsetting viewers based on the way the cast is treated or portrayed. In particular, this season got some heat for the way the boys treated the women during the infamous “Casa Amor” twist in the show.
At Resultid, we’ve professed our love for incorporating user feedback into our business strategy publicly and proudly 😌Twitter has always championed reactive feedback, whether it be for world events, pop-culture, or in this case, to chime in on the hottest reality show the UK has to offer. Back when I interned in public relations, a significant portion of my job was to pull social media reactions to our content to understand how consumers are perceiving it, which would take literal hours because of all the researching, screenshotting, and analyzing I’d have to do manually. In this case, I was able to understand more Love Island tweets than I ever could in a fraction of the time. Twitter is a place where people voluntarily and happily share their unfiltered, genuine input on anything and everything, making it a valuable hub for businesses to collect user feedback from and more importantly, understand how to use it to their advantage. And they say you can’t learn anything from reality TV 😎
