Cable News Trending Topics for 2014-03-23

While tweets about UK soccer continue to be popular on Sunday, the real story was Don Lemon’s hosting almost non-stop MH370 coverage on CNN.  Not only did he get the best engagement of any show (thanks to asking viewers to tweet in questions), but he drove CNN overall to top billing.

One thing that’s interesting to look at is the “reach” of the networks.  Reach is the measure of how many people will see tweets, how often, that mention something about a network.  If 5 people have 2 tweets each show up on their timeline, that’s a reach of 10.  It’s a rough measurement not of how popular a network is in terms of people actively mentioning it, but in terms of people passively (potentially) seeing content about it.  We don’t know how many actually saw the tweets, and undoubtedly it’s a tiny sliver of that.  But it gives a yardstick to measure the networks against each other.

CNN’s reach was about 250 million on Sunday — that is, tweets about them had the potential of being seen 250 million times.  Fox news was a distant second at around 90 million.  So even though there were only about twice as many tweets about CNN as Fox, each tweet was seen by about 2.5 times as many people.

Reach gives you a sense of the power of social media — how ideas and thought expressed on Twitter can have such a large influence on the world at large.

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