Trending Topics in Cable News for Sunday, March 23, 2014 — The Vast Reach of CNN on Twitter

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.

Top Shows for the day:

Category Mentions Show
Most Mentions During Hour 1337 CNN: Don Lemon MH370 show
Most Mentions During Day 5134 CNN: Don Lemon MH370 show

Overall ratings by network

Network Tweet Count Unique Tweeters Reach Male Female
CNN 44867 30743 247542088 75 % 25 %
Fox News 21716 12451 88554839 64 % 36 %
MSNBC 11732 5423 46606147 53 % 47 %
E 4505 3982 15498073 20 % 80 %
Comedy Central 2993 2126 2739514 63 % 37 %
HBO 1930 1507 3620630 70 % 30 %
Al Jazeera 1559 1189 3753357 59 % 41 %
HLN 797 586 2254621 39 % 61 %

Most popular hastags

Hashtag Count
#tcot 5673
#lnyhbt 3857
#370qs 3583
#mh370 2476
#teaparty 2329
#p2 2122
#nerdland 2094
#pjnet 2018
#orwell 1977
#thisiscle 1977

Tag Cloud across all shows

#2a #370qs #aca #afc #akparty #alqaeda #america #arsenal #atheists #benghazi #boycottcanadaseafood #breaking #c2gthr #cashinin #ccot #cfcvafc #chicagoland #cir #cnn #crimea #deathrowstories #disrupters #ebola #education #elclasico #flight370 #flipadistrict #fns #foxnews #freejustina #ftn #gay #gop #govols #guinea #hannity #hemingway #hobbylobby #incrediblehulk #inners #istanbul #kca #libcrib #lnyhbt #maddow #malaysia #marijuana #mcconnelling #mh370 #msnbc #mtp #nena #nerdland #newartpopsingle #newday #news #notcool #nra #obama #obamacare #ocra #orwell #p2 #pjnet #puppybowl #putin #realtime #rednationrising #renewui #russia #s #sisterpatriots #sleep #sochi #spain #stpaul #superbowl #takingthehill #tcot #teaparty #tgdn #thisiscle #thisweek #tlot #topprog #totaldivas #truth #twisters #ukraine #uniteblue #uniteright #uppers #vatican #waar #washington #we #wen #wenger1000 #wengerout #wiunion

 

Word Cloud across all shows

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