Category Archives: Cable Channels

How Engaged are Twitter Users with Cable News Shows?

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35810162Who Tweets to Cable News Shows?

If you look at the overall volume of tweets that mention cable news shows, it’s clear that there’s a lot of chatter going on.  But who are all these people?  How engaged are they? Are they people who casually mention a show once and then never again, or are they engaged in a conversation with and about cable news shows?

To answer these kinds of questions, I analyzed all tweets mentioning cable news shows over the span of a four week period.  During that period, approximately 600,000 distinct Twitter screen names tweeted over 2 million messages that mentioned either a show or a host — a little over three tweets per user, on average.

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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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Ed Schultz settles in nicely on MSNBC weekends

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Back in March it was announced that Ed Schultz’s MSNBC show would move to the weekends, and almost immediately he was disappeared1 from the airwaves to be replaced by Chris Hayes’s All In show.  But something odd happened — his weekend reboot didn’t happen, and the timing of it became murkier and murkier.  Many of us wondered if there was going to be a re-launch at all.  But May 11th saw his return to TV at the 5pm weekend time slot.

The long absence led a lot of us to wonder: Would Ed’s audience return to him now? How would that time slot work? 

Good news: it looks like Ed is back in his groove and, judging by his Twitter engagement, he’s audience is with him.

A year of @EdShow

A year of @EdShow

The chart shows discussion of The Ed Show on Twitter over the past year, and you can see that the past two weekends have hit levels on a par with Ed’s engagement during the  span of his daily weekday show.

Even more interesting, if you compare Ed to the two other weekend “point of view”shows (MHP Show and Up with Steve Kornacki), you can see that he’s getting the roughly same engagement out of a one hour show that they are each getting out of two hour shows:

Buzz for MSNBC Weekend Shows

Buzz for MSNBC Weekend Shows

Glad to see Ed’s gotten back to work!

1: Strange gramatical form to imply the work of an unknown force…