Gretchen Carlson’s new show, Real Story, launched last week on Fox News. Her opening day got great ratings, leading to an expectation that she’d go on to crush her competitors on CNN and MSNBC.  So how’d the week go on Twitter?

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It’s not unexpected that the initial burst of mentions on Twitter started to fade over time — just the newness of her show was enough to start a conversation, but it’s the content of the show and the ongoing audience that will sustain the conversation.  And 2pm is a tough time slot.  So it’s not too surprising that by the end of the week Gretchen’s mentions were on par with Tamron Hall’s, who anchors the 2pm slot on MSNBC.

It will be interesting to see how Gretchen’s engagement trends over the weeks to come.

Note that all times are US Eastern Time. See notes at end for further explanations. For earlier articles on cable news twitter ratings, please see this.

Cable News Ratings for 2013-10-05

Top Shows for the day:

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We’re back to a normal pattern of MSNBC’s The Ed Show getting the most mentions during a show and Piers Morgan getting the most mentions in total throughout the day. Mentions across the networks themselves was fairly balanced (no pun intended) across CNN, MSNBC, and Fox.

One amusing note: there appears to be a bit of trash talking between The Ed Show and Fox’s The Five.  A quick check of the Twitter mention counts suggests “The Five” could be called “The Fifth”, given that they receive about 1/5th of the Twitter mentions of Ed…

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Sean Hannity had a strong day yesterday, garnering the most mentions during a show as well as throughout the day.  MSNBC got the most mentions across the network, however, with Fox and CNN virtually tied for second.

When you look at the estimated age distributions on twitter for each of the main cable news networks, you can see that like most days, the 50-something set is the biggest share of the audience…

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It’s interesting, though, that CNN and HLN skew younger on Twitter.  I wonder if this matches the Nielsen ratings results in general.

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Morning Joe had the best hour on Twitter of any Cable News show, while Piers Morgan continued to bring in the largest Twitter audience overall.  MSNBC, fueled by the shutdown, garnered top mentions of any network.

Note that this update to the Cable News Twitter Ratings includes the most popular hashtags used during the day, which may or may not include the specific hashtags used by shows.  The leading hashtag is one used by Sean Hannity, #lnyhbt, followed by a conservative hashtag, #tcot, and that of MSNBC’s #TheCycle.

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