Category Archives: MSNBC

Cable News Twitter Ratings for Sunday, November 10, 2013

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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

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Cable News Twitter Ratings for Friday, November 8, 2013

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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.

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How’s The Ed Show Is Doing Upon Its Return To Weekdays?

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MSNBC’s The Ed Show has had a rough year.  

On March 13th, Ed Schultz announced that his show was moving to weekends; his time slot would be given to Chris Hayes. Ed abruptly left the air the next day after his show. Then, for several weeks, there was no news at all. Many of us wondered if Ed was off the air for good, with nobody wanting to say so.  Finally, nearly 2 months later, Ed returned to the air on May 11 to begin his weekend run.  He was given the 5pm slot, a time traditionally filled by the “Mr. Hyde” portion of MSNBC’s split personality (the news shows playing the role of Dr. Jekyll).

It seemed Ed was destined to remain on the weekends, but once again MSNBC spun the wheel, and Ed returned to the weekdays, this time at 5pm, with his first show on August 26.  With the proviso that it’s only been a few weeks in the new slot, and that the labor day weekend happened right in the middle of his return so far, let’s take a look at how Ed’s been doing.

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MSNBC’s #AdvancingTheDream Advances on Twitter

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Last Friday (9/6/13), MSNBC replaced two hours of prime time programming with “Advancing the Dream: Live from the Apollo Theater“.  The show was hosted by PoliticsNation’s Rev. Al Sharpton and featured guests including Stevie Wonder, Magic Johnson, Condoleezza Rice, Tyler Perry and Cathy Hughes.

The show promoted the hashtag “#AdvancingTheDream”, which was a smart way to engage the audience via social media.  And the engagement it received on Twitter was great: Continue reading →

Twitter Shows Why Ed Schultz is Moving Back to Weekday Primetime

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Im-with-edshow

Yesterday, MSNBC announced that they were moving Ed Schultz’s The Ed Show back from its weekend exile to the 5pm weekday slot.  The announcement took a lot of people by surprise, although the motivation for it has been known for a long time: the show that took Ed’s old 8pm M-F slot has been struggling in the ratings. MSNBC had made a classic media move — replacing an older anchor with a fresh face — but this time it didn’t work out as planned.

Fortunately for Ed, his fans moved with him to his weekend slots.  Almost immediately he was more popular on Twitter than the other MSNBC weekend shows.  That fan base is who’s carrying Ed back to primetime.

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