7 Day Social TV Summary

Channel 4’s Skint Gets Viewers Talking

The first episode of Channel 4’s Skint got viewers talking this week, with 66,000 tweets from 40,000 individuals. The programme took 38.4% of TV related tweets during its 9-10pm slot, with the tweet demographics split completely evenly between male and female viewers. These high numbers put the programme second on our Monday social TV leaderboard, behind Made in Chelsea with 114,000 tweets.

The Apprentice Maintains High Engagement

New Channel TLC Gets First Spot in Leaderboard

Newly launched Sky channel TLC featured in our social TV leaderboard for the first time this week. US reality show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo was shown on the channel on Tuesday, receiving 11,000 tweets from viewers. The episode peaked at 586 tweets per minute as it started at 9pm on Tuesday, and continued with an average 200 tweets per minute for the rest of the 30 minute programme. The episode came third on our Tuesday leaderboard, behind MTV’s The Valleys and BBC3’s Sweat the Small Stuff.

Britain’s Got Talent is Weekend’s Most Tweeted

Britain’s Got Talent took the top spot for tweets this weekend, getting 123,000 tweets during its 5th episode of the series on Saturday. The episode averaged at 1,869 tweets per minute, resulting in a 56.9% share of TV related tweets for the show during its timeslot.

British Academy Television Awards Top 100k Tweets

The television BAFTAs topped our Sunday leaderboard this week with 106,000 tweets. Tweets about the awards were posted by 62,000 individuals, 46.7% of the posted from iPhone clients. The biggest peak in tweets came when E4’s Made in Chelsea won an award, resulting in 5,500 tweets mentioning the reality show.

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Broadchurch: Most Tweeted Drama Episode

#Broadchurch trended on Twitter in the UK during the day leading up to the final episode and over 60,000 tweets about the programme were posted in the 30 minutes after the broadcast had finished, showing online interaction around the drama far exceeded the series’ 9-10pm time slot. Engagement was heightened by online content being released to fans via Twitter, including an extra scene that was shared just as the last episode ended. Posted by the official ITV Twitter account, the extra scene had over 3,000 retweets and has since been watched over 250,000 times by fans.

The episode had 65.9% of TV related tweets for it’s time slot and took a 43.6% share of all TV related tweets for the day, making it the most popular drama episode we have recorded. View content posted by viewers on Twitter at #Broadchurch.

by Kirsten Williams

Highest Viewer Engagement for Broadchurch

Tweets about who the main murder suspect in the series is have steeply grown in the last three episodes with 2,000, 4,000 and finally during this week’s episode over 5,000 tweets speculating who it could be. Over 31,000 unique Twitter users got involved with the whodunit drama during Monday’s episode, creating the highest peak in viewer interaction of the series with 2,600 tweets per minute being posted as the episode ended.

Twitter conversation during this week’s episode suggests that the character most suspected by viewers is now Nigel, who was mentioned in 1,200 tweets, followed by both Tom and the Vicar with 400 tweets each. Pauline Quirke’s character Susan was mentioned in 700 tweets but opinion is divided as to whether she is now a suspect or not, and finally Joe Miller had 170 tweets.

We expect viewer engagement around the final Broadchurch episode next Monday to be the highest of the series as the murderer is revealed, potentially taking more than the 31% share of TV related tweets this week’s episode had during its broadcast.

Follow tweets using #Broadchurch

Channel 4’s Dogging Tales Drives Twitter Conversation

Channel 4’s Dogging Tales, a documentary looking at the secret world of dogging, provoked a huge response on Twitter last night with just under 3% of its 1.99 million viewers taking to their second screens to tweet.

Within the first 15 minutes of the programme, there had already been over 22,000 tweets from viewers tuned in to Channel 4, which steeply rose to 117,000 for the whole broadcast. This large influx of tweets could have helped drive the higher than average viewer numbers the programme had, as the tweets below suggest. This is something we will be able to share more about once we have integrated BARB figures into our Twitter analysis.

Programmes like this with high tweet numbers can also benefit brands. The on-screen mention of Lynx during the first 10 minutes of the programme resulted in over 3,000 mentions of the brand on Twitter in relation to the broadcast, as well as over 1,500 tweets for Joop, which was also mentioned. This type of unexpected peak in brand exposure on Twitter can be used as a piece of positive marketing, as Lynx did with tweets last night and this morning. Lynx turned what could have been a negative association for their brand into a positive, making the connection between their product and the programme work perfectly. Their quick reaction provoked a positive response from Twitter users.

Good choice of fragrance over on @channel4 - guaranteed to get a bit more attention, whatever the situation..! #DoggingTales

April 4, 2013

‘Crisis meetings’ all morning thanks to Les in #DoggingTales last night… We’ve concluded there is no crisis twitter.com/lynxeffect/sta…

April 5, 2013

Tweets from over 132 verified Twitter accounts including highly followed users like Alan Carr, David Walliams, Louie Spence and pop band The Wanted also helped give the programme even higher exposure on Twitter, with a potential 120 million Twitter users seeing tweets in their timelines about the show.

This type of response on Twitter shows that shock value can prompt high numbers of viewers to share opinions on their second screens. With BARB figures integrated we will start to understand how it also drives tune-in.

By Kirsten Williams

Soap Tweets Reflect Explosive Storylines

Throughout 2012 we saw that twitter engagement around soaps is intimately tied to developments in the plot, and this week we’ve seen huge peaks around two of the major UK soap operas.

The storyline for Channel 4’s Hollyoaks this week led up to the exit of two of its major characters. The build up to the main villain’s exit started on Monday with the death of another character, prompting a peak of 2,188 tweets per minute for the episode, compared with the programme’s episode average of 1,700 for this year. As the plot developed throughout the week this peak reached 2,644 tweets per minute during Tuesday’s episode and then jumped to over 5,000 tweets per minute during Wednesday’s episode. The official Hollyoaks twitter account has been promoting the plotline with fans, sharing the hashtag #BrendansLastDance with all their tweets during each broadcast.

From an episode average of around 6,600 tweets for 2013, this week’s Hollyoaks episodes have been seeing numbers of 28,000, 29,000 and 52,000 tweets for each new broadcast consecutively, demonstrating how much the storyline can influence online engagement. The viewers taking to their second screens this week have continuously provided an online commentary of the action in the soap’s storyline. Our forthcoming BARB features will help to determine whether this helped push up viewing figures.

Coronation Street has also seen high numbers of tweets this week thanks to an explosive storyline, which saw the local pub go up in flames. From an episode average of 6,300 for this year, the soap saw tweet numbers soar to 20,000 and above, peaking at almost 7 times its average episode volume. The two episodes of the soap on Monday, which centered around the pub fire, got 60,000 tweets collectively, with the second episode of the evening pulling in 41,000 tweets from over 30,000 unique viewers.

Format Change Affects Twitter Engagement

Throughout 2012 we identified a number of engagement patterns around different genres of programmme, from interaction during soaps closely following the episode’s plotline, to tweet patterns for films repeating during different broadcasts.

Interaction around factual talk shows like Top Gear tends to follow the programme’s content, with peaks in engagement happening during the most compelling parts of the show. This gives this type of programme a number of spikes in interaction during its broadcast.

This weekend we saw a change in engagement around Top Gear during the second episode of the programme’s Africa Special. The episode was focused on the Top Gear team travelling around Africa and this one main theme saw interaction around programme mimic the type we would usually see with a television drama.

Around 30,000 of the programme’s 48,000 tweets were posted immediately before and during the first 10 minutes of the broadcast, and immediately after the programme had finished. This gave the programme a bookend pattern of engagement similar to BBC3 drama Being Human, which was broadcast during the same evening.

By Kirsten Williams

Using Social TV to Launch a Viral Ad Campaign

Every brand would love their campaign to go viral - but that’s notoriously difficult to achieve. The creatives that strive to make viral hits are akin to alchemists. The benefits are obvious, the potential to create millions of earned impressions for the brand. It’s therefore imperative that when you do have a potential viral hit on your hands you have a social strategy in place to give it the best possible chance of reaching the hallowed ground of viral success.

On Friday Three UK launched a new campaign that clearly got the creative part of the process spot on. It stars a moonwalking pony dancing to Fleetwood Mac, lots of boxes ticked there!

But as well as nailing the creative they also had the three key ingredients for a textbook social strategy in place:

1. On Screen hashtag

At the end of the spot they had the hashtag #DancePonyDance positioned prominently in the centre of the screen. Without this the ad might have a generated a decent number of tweets but lots of different hashtags would have been used, if used at all, and they would have lost the ownership of the social conversation.

2. Promoted tweets

The next thing they did right was to buy promoted tweets for the #DancePonyDance hashtag. This meant that anyone clicking on the hashtag would see the brand at the top of the timeline or if they had tweeted the hashtag they might have seen it in their own timeline.

3. Embedded video

Most importantly the tweet contained an embedded youtube video. This both allows the viewer to view the spot again and to easily share the video among their friends simply by retweeting the promoted tweet.

Want to catch the moonwalking pony again? He’s giving it a wiggle over on YouTube: youtu.be/Ekr05T9Iaio #DancePonyDance

— ThreeUK (@ThreeUK) March 2, 2013

At the time of writing the video had been viewed well over a million times despite the campaign only starting on Friday. In 5 hours of Friday night primetime the campaign generated almost 14k tweets. The biggest peak came during the first airing during Coronation St which had an audience of 8.5 million. This spot generated 2.4k tweets in the 10 minutes after airing. The second biggest peak came in Alan Carr’s Chatty Man, which has a much larger social audience.This generated 2.1k tweets in the first 10 minutes after airing despite the series only averaging under 2 million viewers. This shows that placing spots in shows with large social audiences is much more efficient for generating online buzz for a campaign.

A few months ago we wrote a post about another great piece of creative that targeted the highly social Made in Chelsea audience.

This had many of the ingredients to go viral, but without an integrated strategy in place the campaign didn’t capitalise on the strong Twitter reaction it gained. They didn’t use any on screen hash tags to own the conversation and they didn’t make the content easy to share by buying promoted tweets with embedded videos of the spot.

The end result is that despite generating thousands of tweets from the first couple of screenings alone there was no long tail to the engagement as too much was required of the viewer to share the content. To date the video has only got just over 9,000 views on youtube.

By Ted Littledale

Amplifying a show’s message with Twitter

Last night we witnessed a highly successful use of Twitter by the campaigning TV show Hugh’s Fish Fight. The show managed to get thousands of tweets directed at UK supermarkets pressuring them to improve the sustainability practices of their prawn suppliers.

In recent years it has become commonplace to see Twitter used as as an informal petitioning tool. Its public nature means that corporations have to sit up and take notice when a larger group of individuals come together to voice their opinion on the highly visible social network.

It was therefore a natural choice for Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s Fish Fight to turn to Twitter to put pressure on UK supermarkets to use their buying power to force improvements to the sustainability practices of Prawn farms in Thailand.

This was the message on the Fish Fight website:

Halfway through the show there was a call to action encouraging users to tweet ‘WHAT ARE YOUR PRAWNS EATING’ to three of Britain’s biggest supermarkets, Tesco, Morrisons and The Cooperative. They showed each of the supermarkets’ official Twitter handles on screen so the users knew who to send their tweets to.

The result was immediate and marked, the tweet rate for the show jumping to 2.2k tweets per minute:

The tweets were split fairly evenly between the three supermarkets, 8,066 to @UKTesco , 6,340 to @morrisonsnews and 6,607 @CooperativeFood

It’s a great example of how social TV audiences can be effectively harnessed to amplify messages and give them a life of their own online.

by Ted Littledale

New Series: Towie and Saturday Night Take Away

The first episode of The Only Way is Essex series 8 aired on ITV2 this weekend 207,000 tweets, over 25,000 more than the first episode of the last series of the reality programme. The transmission prompted 10,000 more people to take to their second screens to talk about the show than episode one of series 7, with almost 120,000 people tweeting about the programme as it aired.

Tweets using the programme’s hash tags accounted for over 80% of the TV related tweets around its transmission and almost half the television tweets for the day. The engagement around the show was helped by posts from verified twitter accounts, including cast members from the programme. The official TOWIE twitter account took questions from fans for cast member Joey Essex at the end of the programme, encouraging fans to carry on conversation around the show. The account also account provided commentary during the show itself, promoting a peak of almost 7,000 tweets about the show per minute.

The Only Way is Essex

This weekend also saw Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway return to ITV primetime with a new series, prompting over 134,000 tweets from viewers. The show had tweets from 83,000 viewers, peaking in the first 10 minutes of the programme at 4,000 tweets per minute. Posts from verified accounts including celebrities like Chris Moyles, Emma Bunton and Robbie Williams, who was a guest on the show, helped increased engagement giving the show 60% of TV related tweets during it’s broadcast.

Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway

by Kirsten Williams

We’re hiring!

SecondSync is growing! We’re looking to fill a couple of exciting roles: a Twitter TV Researcher/Analyst, and a backend developer.

Check out our jobs section for more details and how to apply.

By Dan Fairs