Nielsen reveals the TV season’s top shows on Twitter

Monday, 2 June 2014

As the latest TV season draws to a close, Nielsen (@NielsenSocial) is looking back at the memorable programs that leapt off the screen and took off on Twitter, the conversations these TV moments generated and the audiences they reached.

Since launching the Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings in fall 2013, Nielsen has been tracking how programs perform on Twitter by looking at several metrics within the live broadcast window:

  • Tweets: Number of Tweets sent about a TV episode.
  • Unique authors: Number of unique Twitter accounts that sent at least one Tweet about a TV episode.
  • Impressions: Number of times Tweets about a TV episode were viewed.
  • Unique audience: Total number of distinct Twitter accounts accruing at least one impression of one or more different Tweets about a TV episode.
  • Nielsen took a look at the top performing televised programs across these metrics for the 2013-14 season.

The series episode that had the biggest Twitter audience was the final episode of “Breaking Bad” (@BreakingBad_AMC), which reached 9.1 million people. Fans rallied around the #GoodbyeBreakingBad hashtag, which was displayed on air throughout the finale and was used over 300,000 times. Their success was also thanks to the program’s stars being active in the Twitter conversation, with 51,000 Tweets mentioning @aaronpaul_8 and 19,000 Tweets mentioning @BryanCranston.

The most Tweets sent about a single episode was for the May 13 episode of “The Voice” (@NBCTheVoice), when viewers posted 1.92 million times. The show hit a peak of 310,000 Tweets per minute, driven largely by the #VoiceSave effort, which set a new TPM record.

Univision’s series “Nuestra Belleza Latina” (@NuestraBelleza) took home the record for the most engaged fans throughout the season, with an average of 8.3 Tweets per user during each airing.

According to Nielsen research, there were a billion impressions of Tweets about the Oscars during the live window, the most for a special during the past season. Host Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) made Twitter a part of the program, posting a Tweet live during the show which was retweeted 1.1 million times during the course of the night, further growing the conversation. For more detail about the reach of Oscars Tweets, take a look at our Twitter Blog post.

NTTR shines a light on the numerous metrics to evaluate the success of a program. As many of the top programs from the most recent season indicate, developing a Twitter strategy to directly engage with fans can lead to record-setting numbers. For further insight into the top ten TV programs across series, specials, and sports events, Nielsen Social has released more detailed findings on their site.