Recently, social media content has gained popularity as a viable resource for gauging consumers’ intention to buy goods and services. For example, Twitter has been used with promising results by many researchers for predicting box-office returns for motion pictures. Alternatively and for many years, purchase intention (a type of behavioral intention (BI)) has been used for predicting likely levels of demand for new products, successfully measured through traditional surveying methods. This paper investigates how use of social media compares with the traditional surveying tools. Specifically, tweets about the movie are collected during the same period as surveys regarding intention to see a movie are administered. Traditional BI measures are compared with various measures of tweeting activity to gauge how well each correlates with domestic and international performance of a movie. The results show that the two methods are very comparable.  The results also demonstrate that the rate and length of tweets are good predictors of a movie’s long-term success.