Last night’s “Voice” episode featured the Top 12, and for the first time this season, audience votes and downloads are the only determining factor for who goes home tonight. Like last week, I’ll be looking at Twitter numbers as a proxy for voting behavior so that we can see the extent to which opinions expressed there correlate with results. The voting methods as explained on the show were phone, text, Facebook and iTunes download, so Twitter is an independent factor in this equation and has no direct bearing on the outcome.

Last week, the Twitter-derived numbers correlated reasonably well. Not perfectly, though. For Team Adam, I hadn’t set up the topic in time, so had about 1/5 of the numbers I had for the Team Blake and Team Shakira contestants. So there my numbers were just plain off. The other factor was the judge’s discretion, and Blake elected to save the Swon Brothers rather than Justin Rivers. Welcome to the big leagues!

I personally enjoyed many of last night’s performances, but what’s important is what those who might vote thought. I took a couple of different cuts at the data. The first is simply looking at “share of voice” from the period of the airing of the show (starting in the Eastern time zone) through late this morning Pacific time. Here’s what we get:

Simply taking the ranking from most mentions to least during this time period, we end up with a Bottom 2 of Kris Thomas and Michelle Chamuel. We could look at the data another way, though: if we filter by positive sentiment — the idea being that people who express positive opinions are more likely to vote (or perhaps “you vote FOR someone, not AGAINST someone else”) — then the rankings change a little:

Now Amber Carrington and Holly Tucker make up the Bottom 2. However, note that the overall numbers aren’t very high when we apply this filter (sentiment analysis isn’t an exact science by any means, and the software used here is biased towards precision over recall, so is somewhat conservative.

Confounding the data further is iTunes, which doesn’t give precise data but does provide a “popularity” meter. If we look at each of the above sets of Bottom 2, we do see that Amber and Michelle’s performances did not max out the popularity meter, whereas Kris’ and Holly’s did.

One other data point we can look at is a week-to-week difference in Twitter followers. If we rank by percentage gain first, then by overall number, we get:

Based on this, it looks like Michelle picked up a lot of followers, so I’m going to have to go with Kris and Amber as the ones going home, with a possibility that Holly ends up somewhere in there. But I’m not taking it to Vegas — the differences aren’t large. Tough call this week!

Enjoy the show!