2011 MTV Video Music Awards Break Social Media Records

The VMAs made headlines this past Sunday, achieving record ratings for the program and for network. We’re thinking that Lady Gaga’s gender-bending performance, Beyonce’s baby bump, and Britney Spears’ lifetime achievement award all had something to do with the high viewership. The awards made headlines at SocialGuide too, as the most social program we have measured to date. If you tweeted at all about the VMAs, then your comment was really one in a million, because we saw that the show brought in a record 1,323,922 social comments during airtime. (Check out the program page for the VMAs here.)

The VMAs bested Game 6 of the NBA Finals and the recent premier of the Jersey Shore, both very social programs.  Here’s the breakdown:

The VMAs had 559,610 unique users (59% share) and 1,323,922 social comments (55% share.) This activity topped Game 6 of the finals by over 30% of uniques and 22% of comments. It beat the Jersey Shore premiere by 63% and 120% respectively.

The Social Times had this to say about our Social 100 data for the 28th: “MTV took all three top spots for the daily Social 100 on Sunday, August 28, 2011. The top spot went to the MTV Video Music Awards, the second to Jersey Shore and the third to the VMA Pre-Show.”

It’s great to see the broadening interest in social activity around television. We’re also excited that networks are starting to use our social TV data as a new metric to convey the success of their programming. VH1′s recent press release about two of their hit shows, Basketball Wives and Single Ladies, included SocialGuide’s social TV data to communicate the programs’ social activity in July.

The Value of SocialGuide

Our scale. SocialGuide not only tracks the social activity of MTV and VH1, but of 170+ of the most popular broadcast and cable networks. Because we license our US TV  listings data from Tribune Media Services, we track every program, across every program type (new, repeat, series, movies, special and sports events) that air on these 170+ channels –  typically over 4,000+ unique shows/month.

Our methodology. We track the social activity when it matters most – around airtime. And our Intelligent Social TV Recognition System has a dynamic and editorial search process to ensure that we capture the most comprehensive set of comments and the natural ways that people are being social around TV. (We’re happy to give examples if you’d like to learn more).

Bottom line. Our scale of coverage + our methodology makes SocialGuide the most comprehensive and relevant source of social TV data.

We encourage you to explore The Social 100 – where we publish our rank of the 100 Most Social Programs, Primetime, Episodes, Sports Events & Networks each week and  month (and the top 10 of these daily).  Importantly, we also publish the total social activity across all of the networks we monitor – giving networks and the industry a true view of the social share for an episode, program or network.  We now also allow you to export this data to .PDF and .xls and to sign up for a free email subscription to this data.

To learn more about our data, email us at info@socialguide.com.