Two made-for-TV shows – the iHeartRadio Music Awards and the Kids’ Choice Awards – snagged the top spots on Nielsen‘s Twitter TV ratings for the week ended Sunday. Apparently, Nick Jonas in chains (singing Chains) proved irresistible to the twittering masses, who posted nearly 1.6 million tweets seen by 7.2 million people during and around the show.
The No. 2 awards show had very different set of numbers, perhaps reflecting the much-smaller followings of those talking about the show. More than 5 million tweets were posted, but seen by an unduplicated audience of just 5.9 million people. No big followings tapped here, it’s pretty obvious.
The Twitter TV ratings attempt to capture the social-media heat around a TV show during its initial broadcast and the three hours before and after that broadcast.
Other programs in the top 10 included all the usual suspects, including Pretty Little Liars at No. 3, last week’s champ, Scandal, at No. 6 and other frequent visitors to the list.
On the sports side, it was all March Madness, all the time. With the NFL between off-season activities such as the draft or pro days, and the NBA and NHL still a couple of weeks from their endless playoffs, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament filled out the top 10, just as it did with some of its best broadcast ratings in two decades.
Tops was the epic matchup between No. 1 Kentucky, going for a record 40-0 national championship run, against its toughest opponent so far, Notre Dame, which made the favorites sweat until the last seconds of the game before losing by 2 points. The tight and tough game spawned 826,000 tweets that reached more than 7 million people.
Kentucky heads to next weekend’s Final Four, which will also feature the winners of the three next highest-rated games, Michigan State, Duke and Wisconsin. Another Kentucky game, the blowout win over prematurely boastful West Virginia, was No. 5.
And let’s not forget Nielsen’s usual caveats:
Source: Nielsen. Nielsen Social captures relevant Tweets from three hours before through three hours after broadcast, local time. Unique Audience measures the audience of relevant Tweets ascribed to a program from when the Tweets are sent until the end of the broadcast day at 5am. Sports Events include those on Broadcast and National Cable Networks only across all day parts. For multicast events, networks are listed alphabetically and metrics reflect the highest Unique Audience across all airing networks.
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