ABC’s ‘Scandal’: Season 3 premiere tops first Nielsen Twitter ratings
Earlier this year, The Nielsen Company announced that they were going to start a new measurement that attempted to quantify something that has become increasingly important to many networks over the years: How many people are actually tweeting about the show? To us, this is a cool statistic to know, but at the end of the day, tweets don’t save shows. You could have one person tweeting about “Community” two thousand times, but that one person does not monetize the series in doing so in the same way that millions of actual viewers do.
The main impact of this “Twitter ratings” is to simply gauge what has the interest of online users, many of who being within many networks’ target 18-49 demographic. Some of the shows listed below should not shock you (Given that actors live-tweeted some of this past week), but some of the others might.
1. Scandal – With the help of live-tweeting, the series reached almost 4 million people online courtesy of around 737,000 tweets.
2. Miley: The Movement – Yep, and the MTV documentary was #2 on the list with an audience of around 3.2 million people impacted.
3. Saturday Night Live – People on Twitter either really love Miley Cyrus, or love to complain about her.
Some of the other shows in the top ten included “The Voice,” “The X Factor,” and “Dancing with the Stars,” proving that reality competition shows hold a big place in the hearts of many viewers. The irony here is that of the three, both “X Factor” and “Dancing with the Stars” are struggling to get young viewers to watch. Once again, proof that being active on Twitter does not guarantee that your show itself is going to actually become a hit.
Does any of this data matter to you, and do you think that networks are really going to make any decisions based off of it? We want to hear some of what you think below! If you want to read some more news related to “Scandal” and the future of the show, click here. We’ll see if the show continues to be such a runaway smash on Twitter soon.
Photo: ABC