Is that a big number?
From Kantar Media's Twitter TV ratings;
Records were broken on Tuesday as ITV’s This Morning made it to the top of our Leaderboard for the very first time. The mid-morning magazine show saw a whopping 87,337 Tweets, thanks to special guest, and YouTube sensation, Alfie Deyes. Part way through the show, Christine Bleakley and Phillip Schofield told viewers that if they Tweeted #AlfieOnTM 15,000 times then Bleakley and Deyes (who has over 2.3 million followers on Twitter) would put make up on Schofield’s face… blindfolded. The pair apparently vastly underestimated Deyes’ devout following, as the Hashtag was mentioned a staggering 68,028 times and lead to the show taking an unprecedented share of 47.8% of Twitter TV activity for the entire day!
"Records were broken" - sounds like big news. And I'm sure that for This Morning, this is indeed a big deal; they made a play to get audiences "engaging on Twitter", and have some nice results that they can talk about.
(I can almost see the Powerpoint slide now…)
Except... the story here is about how big nearly 90,000 tweets is. But if that was nearly half of the Twitter TV activity for the day, then that means that there was a total of just under 183,000 tweets that day, in total.
That a whole days TV that generated less than 200,000 tweets.
I mentioned before that Harry Styles tweeted one word ("burger") on 1st January this year. At the time of writing now, just over 3 months on, he has had over 200,000 retweets.
His most recent tweet (at the time of writing) had 370,000 retweets. In fact, his last tweet that had less than 170,000 was this one, with 110,000 retweets. But on the other hand, its a link to an Instagram picture with over 1 million likes.
So, when you hear big numbers about how many millions of people a TV programme gets as their "twitter audience", do think about what is actually generating that audience. And bear in mind that it isn't a massive, deep-seated need to tweet about television.
Or at least, that the deep-seated need to tweet about television isn't nearly as big as the deep-seated need to tweet about One Direction.