And the winner of X Factor 2010 is...

It's that time of year again when the nation holds it's breath while Dermot O'Leary announces this year's X Factor winner, and ITV does its best to get us all dialling their premium rate phone numbers in an effort to generate some much needed cash.

Using Social Radar, the world's leading enterprise social media analytics system, we've weighed up the 4 remaining contestants' chances by looking at the amount of social media chatter and the respective sentiment associated with each of them since last weekend's semi-final. Here's how it plays out:

Chat levels

Perhaps this won't come as a surprise, but there's one contestant who dominates in online conversations: Cher Lloyd. Mentored by Cheryl Cole, Cher has claimed more column inches than any other contestant throughout the series and the same is true in social media, as you can see on the graph below:


What is interesting is the relatively low levels of chatter around the bookies' current favourites, Matt and Rebecca. Perhaps their fans are less active online - or they simply don't invoke the same strong feelings as Cher. Certainly Rebecca has struggled to shake off the 'boring' tag all series and this appears to have manifested itself in social media with people simply not talking about her as much as the other contestants.

Sentiment
The picture becomes a lot clearer when we look at sentiment. Again, it probably won't come as a major surprise to fans of the show to discover that Cher has the lowest positivity score of all four acts, achieving just 37% positivity in chatter about her. Here's how the sentiment analysis shapes up:


In contrast to the chat levels, Rebecca clearly leads the way here with the highest positivity rating - 79% - of all the finalists. However the lower levels of chat around her have to also be taken into consideration when we try to predict a winner.

So, who's going to win?
Weighing up all of the evidence from Social Radar, our money's going on One Direction. Although the boy band are not the act with either the highest chat levels or sentiment, the fact they come second in both of these categories puts them in a very strong position. More importantly perhaps, there are clear reasons why Cher & Rebecca outscore them in both of those areas so by setting those issues aside we can confidently declare Simon Cowell's act victorious.


Will we be right? Well, Social Radar has successfully predicted the winner of X Factor's US equivalent American Idol in both 2010 and 2009, so here's hoping we can make it a hat trick of successes on Sunday.