Thousands tweet to save singers on @NBCTheVoice

On Tuesday night, The Voice’s viewers on Twitter had, well, a voice.

Three singers were in danger of elimination on NBC’s The Voice (@NBCTheVoice) on Tuesday night, but for the first time in the show’s history fans were able to save their favorite in real time by tweeting that performer’s name with the hashtag #VoiceSave during the live show. At the end of the night — hundreds of thousands of Tweets later — Kat Robichaud (@katrowbeeshow), a young woman from Raleigh, N.C., stood as the first reality competition contestant saved by a Twitter vote.

Fans flocked to Twitter when host @CarsonDaly gave the signal for the five-minute “Instant Save” voting window to begin. According to SocialGuide, the vote saw 385,842 Tweets between 9:53 and 9:58pm ET — with a peak at 9:54pm of 109,478 Tweets per minute.

In total, there were 595,000 Tweets about the show, up a whopping 517% since last week. These Tweets were sent by 260,912 people, and seen more than 24.2 million times. It was the most talked-about TV program on Twitter Tuesday night. It even dwarfed The Voice premiere in September, when the show scored half as many Tweets.

NBC drove conversation around the “Instant Save” hashtag #VoiceSave long before the show aired. On Tuesday morning, @NBCTheVoice began touting the “Instant Save”, tweeting out a video of Daly giving instruction on how it works.

Throughout the day, @NBCTheVoice, @nbc and @CarsonDaly tweeted to promote the event; fans caught on and began tweeting too. Fan Tweets were even read on-air.

To add to the fun, @CarsonDaly used TweetDeck’s brand-new custom timelines feature to curate the best Tweets of the night.

When it came time for the #VoiceSave, @NBCTheVoice tweeted one last reminder before opening the five-minute voting window as Daly announced it on air.

Voters could also retweet @NBCTheVoice’s three sample vote Tweets or other users’ Tweets with a hashtag and a name. West Coast viewers watching on time-delay still had the option of voting by following @NBCTheVoice and waiting for word on when to tweet and which singers were eligible.

The judges also used Twitter to promote the call to action, and their contestants:

Five minutes later, the voting closed. Kat Robichaud (@katrowbeeshow) garnered the most mentions with #VoiceSave and was saved from elimination.

The data

Hashtags can make the conversation easier to join, and #VoiceSave dominated the results, with 74% of all Tweets about the show using it. For those five minutes, the results were incredibly tight, with every second of the real-time conversation making a difference:

SocialGuide data shows the most mentioned-account was, unsurprisingly, @NBCTheVoice, with 119,718 mentions. In fact, @NBCTheVoice gained 66,675 new followers Tuesday, 13x its daily average.

The next most-mentioned account was that of Jonny Gray (@jonnygraymusic), the singer who was eliminated along with Josh Logan (@Josh_Logan). The eventual winner, Kat Robichaud (@katrowbeeshow), was the second-most-mentioned star of the night — but her name had the most mentions in that crucial five-minute voting window.

The most-retweeted Tweet was this call to action from @NBCTheVoice to save Jonny:

The Voice will continue the “Instant Save” feature of its live results show for the next three weeks, so look out and tweet #VoiceSave.

Do you know of other innovative uses of Twitter? Write to mediablog@twitter.com.