Welcome to another SocialGuide Social 100 weekly roundup!
For the week of Monday, September 5th – Sunday, September 11, 2011, SocialGuide tracked:
- 6,284,926 social TV comments (+64% over prior week)
- 1,950,18 social TV watchers (uniques) (+26% over prior week)
- 2,493 unique programs
- 3.22 comments/unique (+30% over prior week)
photo by: http://whodatdish.com/files/2011/09/Saints-at-packers.jpg
Well, our predictions for a more social September is already panning out with a lift in the number of comments, uniques, and comments/unique versus the previous week.
NBC took the #1 spot for Most Social network, with 536,893 uniques and 1,265,691 comments. We’re thinking the high social activity around the NFL games contributed to the network’s strong performance. More on that below.
Other highlights:
- As usual, Jersey Shore reigned #1 for Most Social Program and Most Social episode (it has to be said that the episode was entitled “Fist Pump, Pushups, Chapstick”). The episode, which aired last Thursday, brought in 95,300 comments by 67,687 uniques.
- The #2 Most Social program was the GOP Debate that aired on Wednesday. It brought in 261,924 comments by 67,765 uniques, resulting in an average of 3.87 comments/unique, and the highest engagement for a program that week. I guess the tweeps had as much to say as the candidates!
- NBC’s Sunday Night Football with the Cowboys/Jets was the #1 Most Social Sports Event with an amazing 492,413 comments by 200,376 watchers. Not only was Cowboys/Jets the most social sports event, but it was the “Most-Watched Sunday or Monday Primetime Game in 14 Years,” according NBC’s press release at TVBytheNumbers. Even better, NBC referenced SocialGuide’s data to describe its NFL record breaking performance:
“According to SocialGuide.com’s The Social 100, both the NFL Kickoff game and the opening Sunday Night Football game was the No. 1 primetime shows in the social sphere for those nights.”
The NFL has definitely come back with a bang. Now how will the Fall TV premieres do? Be sure to check our Social 100 to see where they rank, and better yet, set up your FREE subscription to get Social 100 reports delivered via email every day, week or month. Sign up at the top of the Social 100, and tell us the frequency you’d like the data and your preferred format, .pdf of .xls.
Until next week!
We’ve released our monthly Social 100 data for August, and as usual, we were surprised by some of the results. Before we jump into the data, friendly reminder to set up your free subscription to receive our reports via email.
The data! For the month of August SocialGuide tracked:
- 22,879,876 social TV comments
- 4,311,443 social TV watchers (uniques)
- 5,175 unique programs
- 5.31 comments/unique
MTV was unstoppable this month. The network held the #1 spots for Most Social Programs, Primetime, Episodes, and Network. As we discussed in our last post, the MTV Video Music Awards was the most social program we have had to date. It was #1 for both the Program and Episode category in August, with 879,847 comments by 439,883 uniques! And even more interesting, the four most recent episodes of Jersey Shore held spots 2-5 for both Primetime AND Episodes. They must be doing something right, because the show brings in the most social activity against any other program.
Other highlights of the month:
- Soccer was the most social sport for the month, owning the top 5 sports event slots. The English Premier League Soccer game Manchester United vs. Arsenal took #1, with 491,732 comments made by 178,141 uniques. The Barcelona vs. Madrid game was #2, with 281,622 comments made. Will soccer maintain its dominance? It will be interesting to watch now that the NFL is kicking off tonight. We predict a shift in September’s monthly data…
- Without a doubt, The Bad Girls Club is Oxygen’s most social show. With a new cast and even more drama, it’s no surprise the show ranked #6 Most Social Program, Primetime, and Episode. The program brought in 471,666 comments made by 177,234 uniques. The “Bad Girls” are clearly “good” socially!
- There’s one cartoon that always exceeds the others and that’s the #3 Most Social Program of the month, Spongebob Squarepants. It had 433,529 comments made by 270,948 uniques, which is a 6.28% share.
August was hot, but will September be hotter? We think so, now that networks are really getting behind their social strategies. We look forward to the start of the Fall season, which begins next week.
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.
It’s time for another Social 100 Roundup, where we highlight the weekly data about the most social programming on TV.
The data! For the week of Monday, August 15th – Sunday, August 21, 2011, SocialGuide tracked:
- 3,637,380 social TV comments
- 1,376,751 social TV watchers (uniques)
- 2,040 unique programs
- 2.64 comments/unique
MTV was the only network to have 2 shows in the Top 5 Most Social Programs with Jersey Shore, which brought in 269,846 comments (a 13% share), and Teen Wolf, which brought in 105,894 comments (a 4% share). Even in Italy, it seems that Snooki, The Situation, and the rest of the #Jerzday cast never fail to entertain us.
Other highlights:
- Soccer was the most social sport for the week, owning 3 of the top 5 sports events. The Spanish Super Cup game, Barcelona vs. Real Madrid, on Gol TV was #1, with 172,715 comments made by 77,611 uniques. NFL preseason games were not far behind at #3 and #4. According to Mashable, social media is changing the NFL as the majority of the players, coaches, and teams now have Twitter accounts. It will be interesting to see if the NFL games will surpass soccer once the regular season gets going in the Fall.
- MyNetworkTV was the #1 network (up one spot from it’s #2 rank last week), bringing in 511,267 comments. Looks like people still enjoy those re-runs of Family Guy, Oprah, That 70s show, and the rest of the syndicated favorites.
- Jersey Shore stole the #1 spot for Programs, Primetime, and Episodes this week: The infamous “Twinning” episode that aired last Thursday brought in 174,598 comments made my 112,444 unique watchers. We predict this week’s episode will also do well when the long-awaited brawl between Ron and Mike “Situation” goes down this Thursday night.
Like this data? Export any report to .xls or .pdf from the site. Even better, set up your FREE subscription to get Social 100 reports delivered via email every day, week or month. Sign up at the top of the Social 100, and tell us the frequency you’d like the data and your preferred format, .pdf of .xls.
And again, please check our FAQs if you have any questions or feel free to email us at info@socialguide.com.
We’ve launched two new and important features that we are excited to share: SocialGuide Profiles and Programs. What are they?
SocialGuide Profiles:
SocialGuide has organized the millions of comments made about “live” or linear TV by the millions of people who have made these comments and the shows they are social about. To start, we’ve launched 6 million+ SocialGuide Profiles which surface over 43 million social comments made about to 1,700+ program pages. What’s in a Profile?
The Profile is the personal home base for social TV enthusiasts – and is where they can see what TV shows their friends are also talking about and get TV recommendations for their favorite social shows. For example, if someone has tweeted about Intervention, SocialGuide recommends the programs that other Intervention tweeps have talked about. For example, it would be shows like Teen Mom, The First 48, Mobwives, Hoarders, and Basketball Wives.
Profile Examples:
KimTV
TalkingTV
JustinBieber (because you always need a Bieber hook, right?)
Social TV enthusiasts can join here, then view ‘My Profile’ to see what shows they have been social about, what their friends are digging, and our recommendations.
SocialGuide Programs:
This is the “social home base” for all of your favorite TV shows and where we pull in all relevant social information about those programs. With over 1,700 of these Programs launched, most likely if you watch it – we have it.
What kind of information will you find?
- Social Stats: The total number of social fans and comments that have been made about the program–we’ve been keeping a running tab since January 1, 2011.
- Suggested Follows: We’ve programmed thousands of Twitter accounts of the cast and crew members of the program. So if someone is associated with the show, you’ll see his or her account (and you can follow them right from our platform).
- Weekly TV Schedule: Displays when the show will air next – and even better, when there is a new episode. It’s an easy way for tweeps to join the conversation.
- Friends Who Talk About This Show: When logged in to SocialGuide, we surface which of your friends are also social around the show.
- Most Social Fans: Displays all of the social fans for that program, ranks them based on their social activity, and posts their most recent comment. You can see who are the most social fans for the past 7 days, 30 days, or of all time.
We think these Profile pages are pretty cool, but please check them out for yourself.
Examples:
America’s Got Talent
Big Brother
SportsCenter
Swamp People
More is coming to both Program and Profile pages. We’ll be sure to keep you informed.
It’s time for our weekly Social 100 Roundup! This is where we will highlight weekly data about the most social programming on TV. The data comes from the Social 100, our system which measures the social activity around every television program aired across 160+ of the most popular broadcast and cable networks in the US. If you want more detail about our methodology and our social TV measurements, please see our last post.
So why is it important to track this activity – and publish it – every day, week and month? We believe this gives TV fans, and the television and media industry, a new standard for understanding the social impact of the TV shows, and a baseline for social TV in general. For more about this, Broadcasting & Cable and Lost Remote both talked about our measurement system in recent articles.
Now for the data: For the week of Monday, July 4th, 2011, SocialGuide tracked:
• 2,007,691 social TV comments
• 884,075 social TV watchers (uniques)
Interestingly, only one broadcast network, CBS, made the top 5 for Primetime this week. Big Brother, entering its 13th season had its premiere on July 7th, and brought in over 45,000 social comments by 20,000+ unique social tv watchers.
Other highlights:
• #1 sports event was the MLB Baseball game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the New York Yankees. It had 89,053 comments by 54,410 uniques. We guess Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit might have had a little something to do with this. (Congrats Jeter!)
•#2 most social sports event was the Quarterfinal in the Women’s World Cup between Brazil and USA. Amazing game. We’re clearly not alone when we say we look forward to seeing #USWNT go to the finals.
• If anyone doubts the power of Oprah Winfrey, repeats of her program, The Oprah Winfrey Show, are still scoring high on the social charts. It was the #10 most social program with over 26,000 comments this week. Wow!
There is so much more to explore within our Social 100 and we encourage you to look at this data. We think you’ll find yourself surprised as we were by some of the results (especially with the show that took the #1 spot for overall most watched program of the week!) So please check out the Social 100 and read our FAQs if you have any questions.
Here at SocialGuide, we believe in looking at social comments happening around TV shows as they are airing. Why? Because this is where real social TV is occurring. And Twitter agrees: “a good percentage of the 90 million tweets per day are television related with Twitter peak times happening during real-time broadcast TV prime time.”
Since January 1st, 2011 we’ve monitored and stored 90 million comments from 9 million unique people for 18,000 unique television shows.
So what do we consider to be a social TV comment? Well there are the “check-in” services where people can check into shows whether or not that program is airing. This only represents about 1% of social TV comments that are shared. The next largest group is what we consider to be “Twitter check-ins,” which is when people use explicit words or abbreviations around the shows they are viewing (e.g. “I’m Watching Glee” and “#NW American Idol.”) But, far and away, the largest pool (89%) of comments about TV are what we call “implicit” comments. This is where we come in.
SocialGuide has created an Intelligent Social Television Recognition System that dynamically recognizes all the ways people are being social around a TV show. This includes program names, a program’s social abbreviation(s), and other common natural language that is used to describe a TV show. We’ve also inputted thousands of cast members and athletes’ Twitter accounts so that @replies directed to these stars are included in this data as well. For example, if someone at replys @KimKardashian while “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” is on air, we consider this to be a social TV comment.
We are committed to capturing comments around air-time and we will continue to evolve our system so that we can bring forth the most relevant social TV content and data.
If you have questions about our methodology, we’d love to hear from you.
We’ve actually been live with our beta since March, but because we’ve been hustling to get our products rolled out, we’re only now ready to get our blog on. Better late than never, right? Thanks for your patience.
At SocialGuide, we’ve had the pleasure of immersing ourselves in the social conversations that people are having about TV. And there are a lot of them. This year we’ve seen over 85 million comments by nearly 9 million unique people. And this behavior is likely to increase. Studies show that of the 300 million Americans who watch TV, 60.4% of them are on a mobile device while they watch.
So a lot of people are being social, but as a TV fan, how do you make sense of all of this activity? That’s where SocialGuide comes in.
SocialGuide is a social TV platform. We know the shows that are airing across the country, on every cable and satellite system. We then identify, capture and filter the millions of comments that people make about TV shows – as these shows air. From this activity we do a few things:
• We’ve created the first real-time, “Social Programming Guide” or SocialGuide, which ranks shows on your TV system in order of their social popularity. Think of it as a crowd sourced TV listings guide. You no longer have to go to your cable guide and scroll endlessly though the channel listings trying to find something to watch. SocialGuide will tell you what shows, along with their channel numbers, are trending right now.
• We’ve created the ultimate social show companion to use while you watch your favorite shows or sporting events. From the SocialGuide, click on any trending show to see the real-time social activity around that episode or live event. As a default, you can see what “Everyone” is saying about this program – see funny comments or find new people to follow. Or if you’d prefer, view the “Friends” stream so you can see what your friends are watching and talking about. We’ve also added thousands of Twitter accounts into our Cast & Team stream – so you can follow what the stars and athletes are tweeting as the event happens. It’s easy to tell people what you are watching and easily join in the conversation.
• For those with an iPhone or Android device, we’ve released our SocialGuide App. Now you can get SocialGuide and the all filtered social streams – on your mobile device. You can read more about our app features and download it here.
• Finally, we’ve launched the Social 100. This is our social ratings product, and the first public ranking of the 100 Most Social Programs, Episodes, Primetime, Sports Events and Networks. This gives TV fans, and the television and media industry, a new standard for monitoring the social activity around Television. We’ll be following up with more info on the Social 100 so stay tuned.
We’re just getting started but we think we’re really on to something. Fortunately, it doesn’t appear that we’re alone in our positive thinking. We’ve been thrilled by coverage about SocialGuide in TechCrunch, Lost Remote, MultiChannel News, SocialTimes, GigaOM, All things Digital, and The Los Angeles Times. Here’s more of our recent press. Equally exciting, we were named on of one of the “10 NYC Start Ups to Watch” by the editors of Time Inc.
Our imaginations have been captivated by the witty, funny, thoughtful and sometimes bizarre and even outrageous comments that millions of people have shared about their favorite TV shows. We’re seeing more and more of this activity – and are just getting started in creating great products around it.
Thanks for reading and we hope you continue to track our progress. We love feedback. Use our Feedback link (on any page) or comment below.
Team SocialGuide
@Social_Guide
