Award Shows and Sports Telecasts Most Popular on Social Media

By Douglas Pucci
Follow @SonOfTheBronx

The start of 2013 awards season was upon us last week and it drew much interest on social media.

The televised event with the week’s most overall social buzz was CBS’s “The 39th Annual People Choice Awards” with a considerable 6.4 million social mentions. NBC’s “The Golden Globe Awards” on January 13th, hosted by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, ranked second among Broadcast shows for the week and third among television overall (including cable). The 70th edition increased its social media impact from last year by an astounding 256 percent. Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig’s presentation skit was the awards’ moment that attracted the most social buzz.

Cable’s top event was college football’s BCS National Championship game. Alabama dominated Notre Dame 42-14, but Miss Alabama USA and girlfriend of winning Crimson Tide quarterback A.J. McCarron, Katherine Webb was the biggest social media winner of them all, thanks to the on-air ogling by ESPN’s sportscaster Brent Musburger during the game’s telecast. To-date, Webb has gained over 270,000 Twitter followers since January 7.

The winter return of ABC Family’s “Pretty Little Liars” ranked second on the Cable chart, and seventh of all of TV – had even more mentions than Fox’s Green Bay-San Francisco NFC Divisional playoff, which delivered over ten times the viewership of “Liars.”

The four National Football League postseason matchups all reached the social media top 8 of all of television, with the double-overtime Baltimore-Denver classic tops among the weekend’s playoffs, by far.

Television on Saturday nights are usually a barren wasteland of programming, but this past Saturday, it came alive with two events: Fox’s aforementioned Green Bay-San Francisco NFC Divisional playoff (ranked 6th in Broadcast) and ABC’s Miss America Pageant (ranked 9th in Broadcast).

CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory” reached a series-high in total viewers last week. With an increase of 20 percent in mentions from its previous week, the show ranked eighth in social buzz on the Broadcast chart and seventeenth place of all of television (including cable).

“Piers Morgan Tonight” may not give CNN the ratings jolt it needs, but January 7th’s edition of the program generated lots of online buzz, courtesy of a fiery debate about gun control between its host Piers Morgan and his guest, conservative radio talk show host Alex Jones. It was the tenth-ranked cable show (and 18th of all of television) in social media mentions.

Trendrr, the New York-based company that measures the social media impact of television’s programs and events, have tabulated data from January 7, 2013 6:00 a.m. to January 14, 2013 5:59 a.m. Eastern and compiled a list of the top 10 broadcast and the top 10 cable shows of the past week by factoring their activity on the online services Twitter, Facebook, GetGlue and Viggle on days of their respective telecasts.

Source: Mashable