‘Pretty Little Liars’ tops ‘The Walking Dead,’ ‘Teen Wolf’ as most ‘social’ show on TV

“Pretty Little Liars” is going to be ending its run on Freeform in the spring, but it looks right now as though it is ready to go out on top.

According to research from ListenFirst Media and as reported by Variety, the series starring Lucy Hale, Shay Mitchell, and more had the highest level of social engagement of any show in 2016 — with social engagement being defined as “consolidated measure of public engagement on social media for the following types of activity: fan growth, content responses, and conversation volume (across Facebook, Instagram and Yahoo’s Tumblr). The research firm’s “fan growth” metric measures new fans and followers gained on official show accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube.” It reportedly does not include Twitter thanks to a Nielsen deal that is in place there, but even if it did “PLL” would still be at the top of the list.

Using this research, “Pretty Little Liars” had an engagement score of a whopping 256 million, which was almost double what second-place finisher “The Walking Dead” had in close to 145 million. Given all of the craziness that happened on the AMC show this past year with Negan and the significant deaths that took place, we’re almost shocked it’s not even higher — which is kind of a crazy thing to say given that we are talking about 145 million here. This is more than double “Teen Wolf,” which is in third place with just over 70 million impressions. “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” was in fourth.

The thing that probably surprises us the most is that “Game of Thrones,” despite being one of the biggest shows of the past several years, barely made it into the top ten at #9. “Shadowhunters,” which was the #1 new series, actually has a lead on the HBO hit by more than 20 million.