Archive for the ‘Trends’ Category
New fall TV shows – which ones won’t last?
At TweetReach, we’ve tracked a lot of tweets about television, from special events like the Oscars, the Golden Globes and the Super Bowl, to regular weekly episodes of many of your favorite shows. That’s because we (and our customers) know that Twitter can tell us a lot about what an audience thinks about a show, from how much viewers tweet about a show, to when they tweet about it, to what they actually tweet about. There’s a lot we can learn about a TV program’s success just by analyzing the tweets about it.
So we thought it would be fun to track this fall’s 25 new shows on the five big broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, NBC) to see what Twitter thinks about them. But we’re not content to just rank Twitter’s favorite shows. Oh no. Inspired by the New York Times’ Fall TV Season Ratings Pool and based on Twitter chatter, we’re going to predict what new fall shows will be canceled.
Want to play along? Leave your predictions in the comments. Which new shows do you think will be canceled? Or, even better, which new shows do you wish they’d cancel?
We’ll be posting throughout the fall with our updates, predictions and conclusions (and maybe we’ll even feature some special guests along the way!). For reference, here’s a list of the new fall shows, ordered by network.
ABC
- Charlie’s Angels
- Last Man Standing
- Man Up
- Once Upon a Time
- Pan Am
- Revenge
- Suburgatory
CBS
- 2 Broke Girls
- A Gifted Man
- How to Be a Gentleman
- Person of Internet
- Unforgettable
CW
- H8R
- Hart of Dixie
- Ringer
- The Secret Circle
FOX
- New Girl
- Terra Nova
- X Factor
NBC
- Free Agents
- Grimm
- Prime Suspect
- The Playboy Club
- Up All Night
- Whitney
Extreme tweets: How ESPN’s X Games social strategy paid off
We worked with ESPN to measure Twitter’s reaction to this year’s X Games 17, held in Los Angeles, California from July 28-31, 2011. Hundreds of athletes from 17 countries competed in sports like skateboarding, motocross, BMX and rally car racing. And over the four days of the X Games, 97,200 people tweeted 188,813 times, generating an impressive reach of 37.7 million*.
How’d they do it?
“Our goal going in was to make the event as social as possible,” says Mick Kelleher, Associate Manager of Multimedia Content Strategy for the X Games. This was a big, integrated effort combining all the ESPN teams responsible for producing the X Games. The TV production team showed the #xgames hashtag frequently during the telecast, included athlete Twitter accounts in on-screen bios as well as showing athlete tweets on air. The social team used the @XGames Twitter account to keep their followers on Twitter up to date on all the events. The social integration even went all the way to the event site, where they encouraged fans attending the Games to tweet.
The results
ESPN used TweetReach Pro Trackers to comprehensively track and analyze all mentions of the X Games on Twitter for the week leading up to the event and during the event itself. As you can see below, the strong results of their social strategy speak for themselves.
The most retweeted tweet about the games was from @LilTunechi, which received 905 retweets and generated more than 3 million impressions. 
One of the biggest stories to come out of this year’s X Games concerned Travis Pastrana, who broke his ankle and leg in the Moto X Best Trick competition on Thursday, but later competed – and placed fourth – in the RallyCross final on Sunday.
We analyzed tweets about several events in detail, including Moto X Best Trick, Skateboarding Big Air, BMX Park Freestyle, Rally Car Racing, Skateboard Street, and RallyCross. At one point during the RallyCross final, viewers noticed something strange; 200 people tweeted that they spotted The Stig from Top Gear walk behind Brian Deegan during an interview. Here are the big moments from one our favorite X Games 17 days. Click the image for the full size version.
Congrats to all the athletes who competed this year! Thank you for an exciting and action-packed four days at X Games 17.
*Read this for more on how we calculate reach and other metrics. And, are you interested in this kind of analysis for your media event? Let’s talk.
Ask Obama: The President’s first Twitter Townhall
President Obama held his first-ever Twitter Townhall today. For several days, White House staffers have been collecting questions from the public on Twitter. Anyone could contribute a question for the President by just adding the #AskObama hashtag to a tweet.
We followed all the #AskObama tweets during today’s Q&A session. During the hour-long event, we tracked 64,789 tweets from 29,772 contributors with a reach of 35 million. There were more than 161K total tweets posted yesterday with a daily overall reach of 49.5 million. Here’s a word cloud of those tweets (thanks, Wordle!).
We wanted to understand just how many tweets were posted about some of those topics. Nearly a quarter of all questions were related to jobs and unemployment, about 18% related to the economy, 10% about taxes, and 5% about education. Of course, not all questions were about serious topics like jobs and the economy. More than 100 people asked if the president prefers boxers or briefs, and 200 asked the president to bring back Arrested Development (or to hurry the movie along). And there were more than 1,000 retweets of the Nyan Cat.
Finally, here are a few of our favorite less-than-serious questions. We’re still wondering about the answer to the third question ourselves. And of course we all know the answer to that last one.
The season finale of Game of Thrones in tweets
Here at TweetReach, we’re big fans of the Games of Thrones franchise – the books and the HBO television show. So thought it would be fun to take a look at tweets about last night’s season finale. Here’s a word cloud made from tweets about the show, courtesy of Wordle (click on the picture for full size).
The final episode of The Oprah Show in tweets, both sad and sarcastic
Yesterday, we tracked 253,321 tweets from 160,458 Twitterers about Oprah Winfrey’s final episode of The Oprah Show. The tweets have been pouring in all week. We, along with Resource Interactive, have monitored more than 600,000 tweets about Oprah and her show this week alone. 
Dozens of celebrities tweeted their congratulations and opinions on Oprah’s last show, including @TheEllenShow, @ricky_martin, @MariahCarey, @RevRunWisdom, @aplusk, @DENISE_RICHARDS, @Alyssa_Milano, @michaelianblack, @kevin_nealon, @kathygriffin, and @AnnCurry.
The Oprah Show aired for most markets at 4:00 p.m. local time. During the 4:00 p.m. hour in EDT, tweets spiked up to 2,500 tweets per minute during the final moments of the show. That’s a sizable spike, but compared to the 2011 Academy Awards (11,780 tpm) or even the Chrysler ‘Imported From Detroit’ Super Bowl commercial (2,816 tpm), it’s not even close to the highest spike we’ve seen for a television event (of course The Oprah Show wasn’t aired live in all markets at the same time, so these aren’t completely equal comparisons).
A few more tidbits from the data:
- 4,511 tweets including references to tears
- 8,001 tweets mentioned crying
- 5,183 tweets referred to feeling sad
- 12 tweets used the phrase “my life is over”
But not everyone was unhappy to see the show end. Many of the most-retweeted tweets were sarcastic remarks or jokes about The Oprah Show. For example, these tweets from @funnyordie (via @robhuebel) and @DamonLindelof received 1,068 and 677 retweets, respectively.
Oprah’s main demographic is women over 35, which isn’t really Twitter’s main demographic. So some of the most popular tweets about Oprah yesterday, like the two above, had nothing to do with the content of the show. But other popular tweets were quotes from the show itself, like these:
Oprah gave out her personal email address – oprah@oprah.com – on air and 1,179 people tweeted about it. She’s probably going to get a lot of emails. Good thing she has the time to read all those now. Just don’t accidentally email Opera.
Tweeting goodbye to Michael Scott on The Office
Yesterday marked Steve Carell’s last episode portraying Michael Scott on The Office. Preliminary Nielsen ratings show last night’s episode of The Office earned a 4.1 rating and garnered more than 8 million viewers, making it one of the most-watched episodes of the season.
We tracked nearly 40,000 tweets about The Office and Michael Scott yesterday. These tweets reached a potential audience of more than 15 million people. During the east coast airing, tweets peaked around 1,100 a minute (compared to a peak of about 100 tweets per minute in last week’s episode).
Tweets about The Office on Thursday, April 28, 2011 (all times are displayed in PDT)
The big spike occurs in the hour of 6:00pm – 7:00pm PDT (9:00pm – 10:00pm EDT), when the episode aired in the Eastern and Central time zones. Approximately 80% of the U.S. population lives in these time zones, so a majority of the live domestic audience was watching during this hour. By comparison, the smaller spike at 9:00pm PDT included 2,546 tweets.
Tweets about Michael Scott and Steve Carell on Thursday, April 28, 2011
We separately tracked tweets specifically about Michael Scott (and/or Steve Carell), which saw a sustained high volume throughout the day. There were 35,460 total tweets yesterday, reaching a potential audience of 15.57 million. Most of these tweets were either quotes from Michael Scott (including 2,068 “that’s what she said” tweets) or fans talking about how they would miss Steve Carell on the show and how sad they were that he was leaving.
The most retweeted tweet came from @Lord_Voldemort7, which received 921 retweets and generated 1,166,149 impressions.
The tweet that generated the highest exposure was from @EW, which received 35 retweets and generated 2,045,163 impressions.
Overall, it was a pretty highly tweeted event, but not even close to some of the highest tweet volumes we’ve seen, even for a television event. For example, our friends at Mass Relevance tracked more than 4 million tweets about the British Royal Wedding last night. Of course, Steve Carell’s last episode on The Office doesn’t exactly compare to the international, once-in-a-generation pageantry of a royal wedding. Regardless, fans responded positively to Michael Scott’s farewell and seem optimistic about the future of The Office. Michael Scott left a big hole that won’t be easy to fill. That’s what she said.
Already missing Steve Carell: Tracking tweets about The Office
With Steve Carell’s final episode of The Office coming up later this week, we’ve been tracking tweets about the show to see what people are saying about Carell’s departure and the show’s future. (In case you haven’t noticed, we really love what Twitter can tell us about how people watch television and what they think about their favorite shows.)
As you might know, Steve Carell has played the character Michael Scott throughout the first seven seasons of The Office; Michael is one of the main characters on the show. Since Carell announced that he would leave the show this season, people have been talking about what will happen to the show without him. NBC has gone to great lengths to bring on a slew of guest stars for Carell’s final episodes, including celebrities like Will Ferrell, Jim Carrey, Will Arnett, James Spader and Ray Romano. This has led to all kinds of speculation about who will replace Carell and how his replacement will (or won’t) measure up.
Over the past week, we’ve tracked tens of thousands of tweets about the show. Many viewers are sad that Michael Scott will no longer be on The Office – seriously, more than 10% of all the tweets we’ve tracked about his departure include words like “cry”, “tears” and “sad”. But lots of fans are open-minded, even optimistic, about the show’s future. In fact, very few people have expressed a desire to stop watching after Steve Carell leaves; so far, less than 1% of all tweets about the show mentioned not watching The Office anymore after this season.
What do you think? Are you a fan of The Office? Will you continue to watch after Steve Carell leaves? We’re continuing to monitor these tweets, so we’ll post an in-depth analysis after Carell’s final episode airs on Thursday.
Comparing social media tools: Monitoring, workflow and measurement solutions
Liza Sperling recently wrote a great guest post on oneforty where she compared various social media tools. She included a useful breakdown to help marketers, community managers and others interested in social media understand when they need what kind of tool. While Liza’s taxonomy is really helpful, we think about it a little bit differently. Here’s the way we like to classify social media tools:
If you’re managing brands or clients in social media, there are probably three functions that are of primary importance to your work: monitoring, workflow, and measurement tools. Many tools will fall clearly into one category or another, but there are an increasing number of applications that overlap multiple categories. There aren’t really any tools that do all three things very well, however, so you will probably need to use more than one to accomplish all of these activities, at least for now.
Workflow
Workflow, or engagement, tools help you coordinate multiple social media accounts with multiple authors, allowing you to assign tasks and post updates. These are the communication tools and Twitter clients; if you manage any social media accounts, you’ll probably spend a lot of your time using these kinds of tools. You could also include social CRM applications in this category, as those help organize customers. Our favorites in the workflow category include CoTweet, TweetDeck and HootSuite, but there are tons more in the business dashboard category on oneforty. Many of these workflow tools provide some simple metrics and basic monitoring capabilities, but for more in-depth and comprehensive statistics or listening features, you’ll need to look at tools in the other two categories.
Monitoring
Monitoring (also known as listening and brand tracking) tools help you cut through the mass of social media conversations to get at the ones that mean something to you and your clients. These tools are great for keeping track of what people are saying about a topic, and which conversations are important to participate in or respond to. There are a variety of brand tracking tools listed on oneforty. Many monitoring tools provide some sort of measurement, often through content analysis in an attempt to understand concepts like sentiment and influencers. On the flip side, some measurement tools provide monitoring capabilities; for example, TweetReach Pro is used by a lot of our customers for monitoring brand mentions.
Measurement
Finally, measurement tools analyze social media conversations to put numbers to the chatter. These are all the metrics, statistics, and analysis tools. TweetReach is primarily a measurement tool. This category is probably the most diverse of the three overall social media tools areas. Metrics can be calculated in so many ways for so many stakeholders that each individual measurement tool provides a slightly different spin with its numbers. Because of this, it can be overwhelming trying to choose which metrics tool to use for your particular needs.
And this is why we find it helpful to further break the measurement category down into three more specific areas: paid, owned, and earned media. Forrester recently published research that explains the differences between paid, owned and earned media. I definitely recommend this post if you haven’t read it, but here’s the gist.
- Owned media refers to the sites a company runs – its website, Twitter account, Facebook page, and so on. Owned media metrics tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights help you understand how people are interacting with official sites.
- Paid, or bought, media refers to any advertising or sponsorship, like a sponsored Twitter trend, a Google ad, or any other paid social action. Usually you get some metrics from whomever you purchased the content (like Twitter’s sponsored trend analytics).
- Finally, earned media refers to all the conversation generated from those owned and paid media. This includes word of mouth, spontaneous customer opinion, and any kind of buzz about a brand, product or company that you didn’t pay for or create yourself.
A digital campaign will include elements of all three media types, but you only really control the owned and paid messages. With the earned media conversation, you can simply monitor, respond and measure. Earned media is where TweetReach comes in. Our goal is to help you understand the impact of conversations that spring up in social media about your clients, whether it’s related to a specific campaign or event, or whether it’s the general ambient chatter about a topic that occurs in spaces like Twitter. We want to help you answer questions like:
- What was the reach of a conversation?
- How many people are talking about a topic?
- How many people could have seen tweets about a topic?
- What tweets are generating the most buzz?
- Who is generating the most buzz about a topic?
- How does this week’s buzz compare to last week’s buzz? How about this month’s buzz?
- What conversation did a particular paid campaign spark?
Different measurement tools will provide different metrics in different formats. And many of them can be used in combination with each other and with monitoring and workflow tools. It can be difficult and time-consuming to pick the right tool for your particular needs, but the good news is that the tool you need probably exists. Again, we’ll refer you to oneforty – they currently index nearly 250 social media analytics tools (including TweetReach, hint hint).
A recap of SXSWi 2011 in tweets
The TweetReach team attended the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas this week. SXSWi is a great big gathering of all kinds of interactive professionals – from social media folks to software developers and startup founders, to designers, researchers and basically anyone interested in the digital space. This year’s SXSWi conference attracted 19,364 attendees (nearly a 36% increase from 2010).
During the conference, we monitored tweets that mentioned SXSW. During the five days of the interactive conference, we tracked:
- 626,513 tweets from
- 172,432 contributors with a
- reach of 56,868,452 that generated
- 2.2 billion impressions.
The most retweeted tweet during the conference was from @SteveCase and received 1,523 retweets.
We’re still crunching the rest of the numbers, so we’ll have more in-depth analysis of SXSWi tweets and what people were talking about very soon. Stay tuned.
Twitter goes Hollywood: Tweet analysis of the 83rd Academy Awards
We tracked more than a million tweets during this year’s Oscars telecast (along with partner Mass Relevance). So what did Twitter think of the show? Here’s our analysis of key moments and tweets from the show. Click here to view the full size version of this infographic.
Twitter got pretty excited when:
- Melissa Leo dropped the f-bomb during her Best Supporting Actress speech
- Toy Story 3 won Best Animated Feature
- Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won Best Original Score for The Social Network
- The cast of Harry Potter, Twilight and other films were autotuned
- Oprah announced the Best Documentary Feature award (and when Banksy didn’t win for Exit Through the Gift Shop)
- Natalie Portman won the Best Actress Oscar
- The King’s Speech won for Best Picture
Other spikes were when:
- Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake presented the animated awards
- James Franco dressed as Marilyn Monroe
- Christian Bale won Best Supporting Actor
- Mandy Moore and Zachary Levi’s performed the Oscar-nominated song from Tangled
- Colin Firth won the Best Actor Oscar
- PS22 sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow
By the way, our predictions for the big three Oscars were correct! As we dig more into the data over the next few days, we’ll be posting additional Academy Award tweet analysis here.
Related posts:
- What did Twitter say about the 2012 Academy Awards? Here’s a sneak peek!
- So, did Twitter correctly predict this year’s Oscar winners?
- A night at the Oscars: What did Twitter think about the 2012 Academy Awards?
- The King’s Tweets: Twitter predicts a big night for The King’s Speech at Oscars