When you look at various cable news personalities, some have a large presence outside of their shows. Take Sean Hannity, for example: His radio show is on 3 hours a day M-F, compared to the one hour a day for his TV show (not counting repeats). Both shows point the audience to the same Twitter account, @SeanHannity; as a result it’s nearly impossible to distinguish Twitter chat about the radio show vs. the TV show. That’s why Hannity often wins the best-in-day rating (as he did yesterday), given the 4 hours of fresh content he generates each day.
Other personalities don’t have so much of a secondary venue as a general topic they dominate. Piers Morgan may have one hour a day on TV (in the USA), but his constant tweeting about UK football generates a huge volume of responses; a couple of days ago about 15% of all tweets using the hashtag of the Arsenal team also mentioned Piers.
So it’s always interesting when a TV personality gets mentioned extensively outside of the time slots for their shows. The Melissa Harris-Perry show wasn’t on TV yesterday, but her live on the web discussion with author bell hooks generated nearly 3000 #nerdland tweets. This is on a par with a slow day for her show — all from the web!
Cable executives take note: you can grow the value of your brands significantly through programming distributed via secondary channels. If MSNBC or CNN want to move up in the TV ratings (Nielsens), providing additional content outside of broadcast hours may be powerful tool.
