It might be a bit reductionist to say the week’s Twitter TV ratings from Nielsen are all about racing and fighting, in some sort of sweat-soaked summer homage to The Dukes of Hazzard, but it’s not that far off. WWE, a near-fixture in the Series Specials top 10 the past few months, this week owned the top spot with its Monday night wrestling show on USA and the last spot on that list with its Friday night bouts on Syfy.
In between, there were those squabbling Kardashians and three(!) Big Brother episodes, along with the romantic ups and downs of The Bachelorette and the scheming scripts of Pretty Little Liars. Big Brother is a recent addition to the Series Specials top 10s, but the others are regulars here in the relatively quiet summer TV season.
Nielsen created the Twitter TV ratings to track the social-media heat around given broadcasts. Their measure focuses on how many tweets are reaching how many unduplicated Twitter users during a given show’s first airing, and the three hours before and after that airing. Reality competitions always do well with these measures, as do sports. WWE’s programming nestles in between those two genres nicely.
The week’s racing moments surfaced over on the Sports Events top 10, where NASCAR‘s Brickyard 400, held annually at the temple of Indy Car racing in Indianapolis, took the checkered flag ahead of a relatively slow field. Two spots behind was the final stage of this year’s Tour de France bike race, which saw Italian Vincenzo Nibali wrapping up the monthlong event with the victor’s yellow jersey. Major League Baseball tucked five games into the top 10, including three featuring the New York Yankees and two others featuring their long-ago crosstown rivals, now the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Once again, the stats provide hope for soccer fans undergoing World Cup withdrawal, as matches featuring two English Premier League powerhouses, Arsenal FC and Manchester United, made the list. And at No. 9 on the sports list? Another fight, this one for UFC on Fox and its Spanish-language sports sibling.
As always, Nielsen shares a few caveats with its numbers, to wit:
Nielsen Social captures relevant Tweets from three hours before, during and three hours after an episode’s initial broadcast, local time. Unique Audience measures the audience of relevant Tweets ascribed to an episode from when the Tweets were sent until the end of the broadcast day at 5am. 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 highest Unique Audience across all airing networks, denoted with an asterisk.