John Oliver is back and wins Cable News Twitter on Sunday. Oliver was followed by the two hours of Harris-Perry, the 9am hour of Kornacki, and, first time at the top, Al Jazeera’s 8pm news:

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Raw data: 2015-02-08-ShowStats.csv

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Fox News’ Cashin’ In exploded on Twitter Saturday, with 7K mentions during the 11am hour and 41K mentions during the day.  The 7K mentions is a dramatic jump for Cashin’ In, but, for me, the amazing result is the 41K mentions throughout the day: usually, Cashin’ In’s discussion quiets down fairly quickly after the show finishes, but not this Saturday.

Let me get the rest of Cable News Twitter out of the way before we dive into Cashin’ In’s results.  Following Cashin’ In for best hour were Up w/Steve Kornacki, Judge Jeanine, and the each of the two hours of The Melissa Harris-Perry Show:

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I don’t usually include a graph showing the total mentions for the day, but in this case it’s worth sharing:

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Note that in second place is The Five w/Hosts, which includes mentions of Eric Bolling, the host of Cashin’ In.  It is unclear what portion of The Five‘s mentions are really for Cashin’ In, but is safe to assume a very large percentage are.  That’s part of the challenge of social media analytics — it’s nearly impossible to be 100% accurate in categorizing people’s messy tweets…

Après Cashin’ In, le déluge

Eric Bolling, the host of Cashin’ In, launched a new hashtag for the show, #WakeUpAmerica, and it definitely woke up Twitter.  There were over 31K mentions of that hashtag on Saturday.  Not surprisingly, there were almost immediately some criticisms and questions about its success.

First came the question of whether the hashtag was already in widespread use and not related to Cashin’ In.  So let’s look back a week at how often the hashtag was used. @EricBolling first announced his adoption of #WakeUpAmerica on Friday, 2/6:

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Clearly, #WakeUpAmerica was fairly dormant coming into the weekend, averaging under 400 mentions a day prior to Bolling’s adoption of the tag.

Next we have the claim that a misspelt version of the tag, #WakeUpAmeirca was the one that was really dominating (with the usual snark about its users being unable to spell and therefore of limited intellect).  However, there were only 4313 uses of the misspelt tag on Saturday, with the vast majority of them being retweets.  Furthermore, the vast majority of the mentions occurred after the show wrapped for the day (misspelt usages are in blue, correctly spelt mentions are in red):

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In a strange irony, the mocking of the misspelt hashtag may have temporarily got it trending, which caused some folks to assume it was was trending because Cashin’ In fans were misusing it:

Fox News Eric Bolling asked GOP to trend #WakeUpAmerica to mock POTUS. They trended #WakeUpAmeirca The derp is real pic.twitter.com/YC6rJoNg13

— Nerdy Wonka (@NerdyWonka) February 7, 2015

There are two things that are wrong about this assertion.  First, a huge portion of the uses of the misspelt hashtag were from critics, not fans.  So it’s incorrect to say that Eric Bolling got the wrong hashtag trending.  Second, at no time — even during the peak #WakeUpAmeirca — was the wrong hashtag used more than a third of the usage of #WakeUpAmerica.  And had you subtracted the critics glee, it would have probably only been a single digit percentage.

Conclusions

There is no doubt that @EricBolling and Cashin’ In broke new ground in social media usage on Saturday and generated an amazing response from his fans on Twitter.

There is no doubt that the surge in use of the #WakeUpAmerica hashtag is completely attributable to the show.

And there is no doubt that the use of the misspelt version of the hashtag amounted to no more than an inconsequential portion of the over all usage, consistent with the amount of typos people normally make in Twitter.

Here’s the raw stats for the day:  2015-02-07-ShowStats.csv

Some other comments…

The total mentions for the show are computed from mentions of @EricBolling, #CashinIn, and #WakeUpAmerica, but do not include the #WakeUpAmeirca misspellings.  The total number should be even higher when you count those misfires.  But I don’t generally include misspellings, so it would be inconsistent to make an exception now.

I was also planning to include a count of mentions of Cashin’ In’s guests in this week’s stats, but I have postponed that until next week given the change in hashtags and the huge increase in week over week counts.  I will start to include them in the mix next week as well.

Finally …

There are many valid criticisms of the opinions voiced on Cashin’ In.  But saying that the people who share those opinions are stupid is simply arrogant and not at all a winning strategy.  Politics is a strange game: in order to win, you must convert your enemy, not vanquish him.

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No surprise, The Kelly File finishes up the week with a best hour in Cable News Twitter, giving her wins 4 out of 5 days of the week.  Following Kelly was Hannity, The Five, All In w/ Chris Hayes, and Morning Joe:

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The distance between Kelly and Hannity was very close, with only 12 mentions separating them, a less than 1% difference.

Raw data for the day: 2015-02-06-ShowStats.csv

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