With NBC’s Olympics coverage knocking two weeks out of MSNBC’s schedule, a lot of the daytime and weekend shows were off the air for an extended period. Would viewers find something else to do during those time slots — and would they stick with the new choices after the Olympics ended?
If you look at the Twitter followers of the show, it seems they all came back en masse:
Click on image to enlarge
Last weekend (8/11), Chris Hayes got a huge boost of tweets from the Ryan VP announcement. (If I recall correctly, the tweets were not, in general, expressions of adoration for the choice or the speeches being given). Although those of us watching the show would have probably preferred the Reader’s Digest version of the announcement instead of live coverage, the full coverage re-engaged the Twitter crowd and pushed Chris’ Twitter numbers over 10,000 tweets that day.
This weekend, the Saturday #s weren’t that high, but they are on a par with some of the best numbers Chris has gotten recently. The crowd missed him.
The crowd also missed Melissa Harris-Perry. This Saturday her show had around 5,000 mentions on Twitter, a volume that was only equaled once since the beginning of May.
It’s nice to see these shows have resumed without a hiccup. August is a tough month to get anyone’s attention. But it appears that #uppers and #nerdland are loyal folk, even sticking around through constant interruptions by GOP candidates making stump speeches. (One more weekend like this and I have to assume that scheduling speeches during these shows is an intentional strategy on the part of the Romney campaign 😉 ).
Vaguely related topic:
To follow along with the high volume of tweets on these shows (and the other MSNBC weekday evening shows), I gave up on the usual Twitter client applications and wrote my own that’s optimized for tweeting along with shows. I’ve released a “public beta” of the program, and I would be pleased if you gave it a shot. It’s free, easy to use, doesn’t neet you to install anything (it runs in the browser), and it doesn’t require you to give it access to your Twitter account.
See the start page for it at: www.tweetwatch.tv
(Yes I have awkward timing in making my screen shots. But I really like Fareed Zakaria, so I’m going to keep the screen shot as a sort of vigil for his return).