What really gets people tweeting?
Kantar and Twitter send out a weekly email, with some stats about the top tweeted-about TV programmes. This Christmas;
By far the most Tweeted about show on Christmas Day was Eastenders, with a phenomenal 108,097 Tweets (almost as much as the rest of the top 10 shows added together!) […] The broadcast accounted for over 40% of Twitter TV activity for the entire day and generated almost 13 million total impressions.
Thats a "phenomenal" 108,097 tweets that mentioned the Eastenders Christmas Day special, the characters or the events in the programme as it took place - a programme with 7.55 million viewers.
Is that a big number? Well, that depends on what you mean by "big".
For comparison, have a look at this tweet by Harry Styles of One Direction;
One word; "Burger."
At the time of writing, that had over 174,000 retweets – more than 50% more than the biggest Christmas TV programme on Twitter –, as well as over 255,000 Favourites. I don't know how many replies it has had; considering a few fan's habits of sending hundreds, if not thousands of replies at a time, the figure is probably somewhat meaningless. (Consider that, according to Netbase, Harry Styles was mentioned on Twitter just short of 2 million times on New Years day - you have to work hard to cut through the noise if you want to get a follow. Although presumably, if you are using a follower list to filter out the stuff you actually want to see, you aren't likely to add someone who tweets the same thing thousands of time to your list…)
And its not as though the "Burger" tweet was anything special or unusual (unless there is a significance I'm not aware of – which is perfectly possible…) His previous tweet, somewhat late in breaking the news at 10:05AM that "It's 2015" saw over 365,000 retweets.
I've talked about the One Direction Effect before, but the sheer scale of activity on Twitter around them still astonishes me every time I stumble across it.