Twitter TV Ratings

ABC Family’s ‘Pretty Little Liars’ dominated Nielsen’s weekly most-tweeted list, topping even HBO’s Game Of Thrones. Of course, that’s if you don’t count the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup Finals and the World Cup. Deadline’s David Bloom and Dominic Patten discuss.

Pretty Little Liars easily won the week in Nielsen’s Twitter TV ratings for series and specials, attracting more than 1 million pretty little tweets about the show during its June 10 broadcast and for the three hours before and after that first airing. For a scripted show on basic cable, that’s pretty darned impressive, fueled by the social-media savvy young audience the show courts. On the sports side, final games for the NBA and NHL and opening games of soccer’s World Cup completely filled that Top 10. That said, the crowns claimed by the ABC Family show and the NBA come with an asterisk this week because of data-collection problems Nielsen had in determining how many people were actually reached by all those tweets. The Twitter TV ratings are designed to capture the total audience size, so the asterisk is a big one in this particular toting of tweeting. Pretty Little Liars did, however, turn out the tweople, ending up 44 percent ahead of No. 2, the reality show Love Hip Hop: Atlanta, and far outstripping Top 10 perennial and this week’s No. 3 Game of Thrones. Even on its season finale with yet another shocker ending, GoT trailed the Little Tweeters roughly 4 to 1. Otherwise, it looks like summer has fully arrived on the social-media side of TV watching, given the modest numbers other shows, most of them regulars on the weekly lists, have been able to attract.

Meanwhile, on the sports side, where playoffs for the NBA in particular have been driving big social-media audiences, it was the three last games of the NBA season atop the top 10, led by the clinching Sunday-night game for San Antonio. The biggest first-round games of the World Cup soccer championships followed thereafter. The biggest soccer faceoff of the week was the opening-day game between host Brazil and sacrificial lamb Croatia, followed by matches featuring traditional powers such as defending champ Spain, 2010 runner-up The Netherlands, England, Italy, Argentina and France, plus unsteady North American power Mexico. Only the double-overtime thriller ending the NHL season broke the NBA-World Cup domination.

FYI, Nielsen’s daily numbers show that Monday’s World Cup opener for the U.S., against nemesis Ghana show that it was a huge social-media animal. The match,  which the U.S. won 2-1 after two previous World Cup bow-outs at the feet of the Ghanaians, generated 3.1 million tweets reaching a unique audience of 11.1 million Twitter users (they obviously fixed their data collection issues). That number is far more than Pretty Little Liars and all but that last NBA final game on last week’s Sports Events Top 10. So, whoever’s saying no one is watching World Cup or U.S. soccer may need to adjust their biases ever so slightly.

Oh, and one more thing. Nielsen appends this somewhat dense disclaimer/explainer to help you understand why there are asterisks in the listings:

Nielsen Social captures relevant Tweets from three hours before, during and three hours after an episode’s initial broadcast, local time. Sports Events include those on Broadcast and National Cable Networks only across all day parts. For multicast events, networks are listed alphabetically and metrics reflect the most Tweets across all airing networks, denoted with an asterisk.