A typical weekday with The Kelly file winning best hour and Hannity winning best day. A point of irony: The Daily Show, which featured a spirited debate about “white privilege” between Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly, beat The O’Reilly Factor….

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It was also a sad day in Cable News land, as CNN announced a variety of firings and show cancellations.

Raw data here: 2014-10-15-ShowStats.csv

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Kelly, Kelly — It was all Megyn on Tuesday as she won best hour and best day. That’s not really surprising anymore.  But what’s interesting is that it would have been completely surprising a year ago.  What happened?

First, here’s the other top shows for the day (as rated by “best hour”):

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Kelly didn’t just win — she’s in a league by herself. So how does she do it? How does she get nearly 3 times the buzz of her time-slot competitor, Rachel Maddow?  Certainly, Kelly’s getting more than 3x the ratings is the main reason.  But if we look at Twitter, we can see that MSNBC’s problem is deeper than that.  A year ago, Rachel Maddow was getting twice the mentions on Twitter that Kelly got. What’s happened in the course of a year?

Let’s look at how Kelly and Fox News worked Twitter on Tuesday:

• Fox News sent out 12 tweets that mention The Kelly File.
• Megyn Kelly sent out 18 tweets herself.

As a result:

• The show had nearly 10K mentions throughout the day.
• More than half (54%) of the show’s mentions are retweets.  That generates a lot of buzz without their fans having to do a lot of work.
• 25 tweets made up over 20% of all tweets (because of retweets).
• Retweets of Megyn Kelly or Fox News made up about 22% of all tweets

Fox News’ strategy is to have Megyn personally and the network corporately drive the conversation about her show non-stop.  This sets off a chain reaction that creates a huge volume of buzz.

Compare this to how Maddow and MSNBC work. On Tuesday:

• MSNBC sent out NO tweets that mentioned her.
• @Maddow sent out NO tweets.  (The Ed Show, by comparison, sent out 50 tweets on Tuesday — but also had no mentions by @MSNBC).
• @MaddowBlog (why does she need a second account if the first is barely used?) sent out 3.
• @MaddowApp (wait, she has a third account because the first two aren’t enough?) sent out 8 tweets.

To be clear, I didn’t just pick an anomalous day.  This is very typical. As a result:

• The show had about 3.7K mentions throughout the day.
• Retweets of @Maddow, @MaddowBlog, and @MaddowApp are about 10% of all tweets.

MSNBC’s Twitter strategy seems to be “talk amongst yourselves”. There’s no match being put to the kindling.  And as a result, for all intents and purposes, Rachel Maddow does not exist on Twitter.

This is symptomatic of a much larger problem at MSNBC.  Let’s look at what each network has been talking about over the past several weeks to see where they put their focus.  Here’s the tag cloud for @FoxNews:

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Fox News has been focusing on ISIS, Ebola, and the Kelly File with a little Hannity sprinkled in.  And it’s worked — Kelly and Hannity are doing great.

Here’s what MSNBC’s tag cloud has looked like:

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If the Global Citizen Festival were MSNBC’s marquee program,  it could be a disciplined focus on their lineup.  But since GCF was a one-off, all that social media work is useless now.  It’s a sunk cost in a now worthless investment.  In fact, apart from Ferguson, their focus seems to be on their one-off specials. @MSNBC makes essentially no effort to promote its own regular shows.

I would say that MSNBC’s social media strategy is diffuse, unfocused, and a failure, but that’s presuming they have a strategy.  MSNBC needs to learn how to use social media to protect its brand and grow its franchises.  Until then, it will be constantly outrun by its more agile competitor, Fox News.

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