[Note: Since this post was published, I’ve done a more recent analysis of Up with Chris Hayes’s Twitter engagement.  You can see it here]

Last week, I looked at twitter engagement for the  Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC.  This week, I have a request to do the same for Up with Chris Hayes.

Let’s start with the Twitter action:

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This is pretty much in keeping with what we saw with the MHP show — twitter activity really bursts during the show and falls off later on.  Chris’ # of tweets is lower than Melissa’s from a week ago, but comparing two different weeks isn’t totally fair.  If you compare the two shows, though, you’ll see that Melissa’s tweeple tended to retweet a lot more than the #uppers did. That alone accounts for pretty much all the difference in tweet volume.  Chris — toss out a few bon mots on twitter to get them going!

Still, there’s a lot of people (like, ahem, myself) who tend to sleep in a bit later than 8am on weekends… so maybe that’s the problem.  Some of us are more snoozers than uppers!

So who was Tweeting with Chris? Figuring out gender on Twitter is a bit rough (after all, on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog), but here’s the estimated breakdown of the #uppers:

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For some reason, it makes me want a Pepsi. I must not use Excel’s default colors. Anyways, continuing on …

Past studies (well, from 2009 so that’s kind of dated) have indicated that Twitter users are 55% female, 45% male (and 0% dog 😉 ) so it appears that Chris is pulling strongly male.  I’d be curious to know what the ratings say about the show watchers.  MHP’s tweeple from a week ago were about 59% female, so that’s almost a complete reversal but more in keeping with the estimated Twitter population.

There wasn’t a lot of consistent hashtag usage (except for #uppers):

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Given that there were approximately 6000 tweets on Saturday and Sunday, nothing managed to make it past 5% of the tweets.  The few #nerdland ones are interesting, but I’d have to look at a minute by minute breakdown to see if its a segue thing.

So, what were the most popular (re-)tweets?  Well, popular is probably not the right word here.  There were a very few tweets that showed up repeatedly:

36 tweets is barely over a half of a percent…  So was there a consistent theme to the tweets? Even there, not really — a very diverse conversation in terms of retweets and use of words.  Here are the most popular words used in the tweets:

A few people contributed a hefty number of tweets:

Chris Hayes himself was tied for 118th place with 11 tweets.  Get tweeting, Chris!

What did I learn from all this? Both Melissa Harris-Perry and Chris Hayes have a vibrant group of Twitter followers who chat during the shows, but don’t really continue to chat much outside of the shows.  Whether MSNBC wants to have that dialog continue is unknown to me, but if they do, I have a few suggestions…

1. Chris is using mostly the web for his tweets.  This means that the moment he enters a tweet they go live. A tool like Hootsuite would allow Chris to enter a batch of tweets and spool them out during the day — this allows for a continual presence on Twitter even while asleep or otherwise occupied.
2. Conduct twitter surveys or other things that allow you to interact with the audience but deal with them in an aggregate way.
3. Delegate, if that’s not already being done.  Again, Hootsuite is great for that kind of thing.
4. Watch your usage and engagement.  Every tweet is like an advert, you need to watch the reaction to it to see what works and doesn’t.

Methodology:

I searched for all tweets from Saturday 00:00 to Sunday 23:59 EDT with one (or more) of #uppers, @chrislhayes, or @upwithchris in the text.  The gender of the sender was estimated via standard analytical techniques. Every tweet is labeled with the software that sent it, and so it allows me to analyze usage of various software clients (such as I did for what software the senators are using).