With the both the right wing and conventional blogosphere on the attack against Melissa Harris-Perry about last week’s commentary about Mitt Romney’s Christmas card, it’s no surprise that her show got the most mentions on Twitter during the show and during the day as a whole. Mentions during the show ran about 3 times normal, while mentions during the day as were about 5 times normal. So far, Sunday looks to be a bit slower as she rotates out of the news, but the buzz has continued pretty much unabated since she made those comments a week ago.
Category Archives: Melissa Harris-Perry Show
MSNBC Twitter Year in Review
With the start of the new year, I thought I’d take a look at how MSNBC’s year on Twitter has been. Not all of MSNBC, but the primetime (and weekend) shows that have been on the air for the bulk of the year: Hardball, The Ed show, Politics Nation, The Rachel Maddow Show, Last Word, All In, Up with (Chris/Steve), and the Melissa Harris-Perry Show.
Let’s start with the big chart — the mentions each show received, broken down by month:
Click to enlarge – it’s worth it
At a glance you can see some big trends — September saw a spike in conversation and then a drift back towards normal levels.
But inside the data are some interesting tidbits. Let’s start with The Ed Show, which was abruptly taken off the air, then put into a weekend purgatory slot before returning to prime time:
It’s a big chart for Big Ed, so click to see it all.
You can see clearly that April was a lost month for Ed, and then the next three months depressed his mentions while he was stuck in the weekend slot. But upon his return to prime-time, Ed picked up where he left off in terms of Twitter mentions — that’s pretty amazing given how his show was handled.
Of course, when Ed got moved out of the 8pm weekday slot, Chris Hayes moved in, recasting his Up with Chris Hayes show into All-In with Chris Hayes. “Up” was re-hosted with Steve Kornacki and continued without interruption.
But the fans of the show seemed to have moved over with Chris to week days, as the mentions chart show:
Click to enlarge. It’s like the large type edition.
The best of Steve is struggling to catch up to the worst of Chris, while Chris’s mentions look like they’ve continued unaffected by the move.
One last observation: there’s nothing like a whiff of scandal to drive the discussion on Twitter. And at the end of the year, Melissa Harris-Perry’s show held a discussion of the Romney family Christmas card that prompted Ms. Harris-Perry to issue an apology. That produced a huge year-in spike in Twitter mentions for the show:
You probably get the gist of it right here, but go ahead and click to see a bigger version if you like.
That was about a tripling her normal peak mentions, and the buzz blazed right through the end of the year. It will be interesting to see if it all dies down before everybody returns from their holiday haze…
Happy new year to MSNBC, its fans, and its viewers. I wish you all health, wealth, and prosperity. I’ll resume my daily ratings as the networks return to their normal schedules, and I hope you’ll check in from time to time to see how everyone is doing.
Cable News Twitter Ratings for Sunday, November 10, 2013
MSNBC’s “Taking the Hill” with Patrick Murphy didn’t generate a lot of Twitter buzz yesterday, with the best-in-hour and best-in-day winners both being the Melissa Harris-Perry Show. Part of Taking the Hill’s low mention counts is probably due to the poorly promoted hashtag and lack of a show-specific Twitter user id…
Note that all times are US Eastern Time. See notes at end for further explanations. For earlier articles on cable news twitter ratings, please see this.
Cable News Ratings for 2013-11-10
Top Shows for the day:
| Category | Mentions | Show |
| Most Mentions During Hour | 2558 | MSNBC: Melissa Harris-Perry Show |
| Most Mentions During day | 6817 | MSNBC: Melissa Harris-Perry Show |
Overall ratings by network
| Network | Tweet Count | Unique Tweeters | Reach | Male | Female |
| CNN | 158383 | 97091 | 396292642 | 85 % | 15 % |
| MSNBC | 18673 | 8198 | 77835938 | 49 % | 51 % |
| Fox News | 17824 | 10574 | 73255425 | 62 % | 38 % |
| E | 2201 | 1695 | 13394520 | 38 % | 62 % |
| HBO | 1120 | 948 | 1279117 | 66 % | 34 % |
| Comedy Central | 1107 | 927 | 3149086 | 53 % | 47 % |
| HLN | 357 | 243 | 549866 | 44 % | 56 % |
| FXX | 30 | 29 | 177093 | 35 % | 65 % |
For networks that are not predominantly news, only news(-like) shows are included. See the detailed listings below for precise shows
Cable News Twitter Ratings for Friday, November 8, 2013
When you look at various cable news personalities, some have a large presence outside of their shows. Take Sean Hannity, for example: His radio show is on 3 hours a day M-F, compared to the one hour a day for his TV show (not counting repeats). Both shows point the audience to the same Twitter account, @SeanHannity; as a result it’s nearly impossible to distinguish Twitter chat about the radio show vs. the TV show. That’s why Hannity often wins the best-in-day rating (as he did yesterday), given the 4 hours of fresh content he generates each day.
Other personalities don’t have so much of a secondary venue as a general topic they dominate. Piers Morgan may have one hour a day on TV (in the USA), but his constant tweeting about UK football generates a huge volume of responses; a couple of days ago about 15% of all tweets using the hashtag of the Arsenal team also mentioned Piers.
So it’s always interesting when a TV personality gets mentioned extensively outside of the time slots for their shows. The Melissa Harris-Perry show wasn’t on TV yesterday, but her live on the web discussion with author bell hooks generated nearly 3000 #nerdland tweets. This is on a par with a slow day for her show — all from the web!
Cable executives take note: you can grow the value of your brands significantly through programming distributed via secondary channels. If MSNBC or CNN want to move up in the TV ratings (Nielsens), providing additional content outside of broadcast hours may be powerful tool.