MTV’s Video Music Awards had a lot to prove in Sunday night’s telecast, as previous years have broken Twitter records and created entirely new ways to use social media throughout an awards show.

Since 2010’s utilization of the VMA’s Twitter Tracker, online tweeting/posting/Facebooking/GIFing has been a large part of the show, and the next day’s conversation surrounds what kinds of tweets per minute the show got instead of household ratings (not to say they don’t do well in that department as well—this year garnered more than 10 million viewers). This year was no different.

The 2013 VMAs, streaming on the MTV site today, was all about encouraging fans to watch live to join in on the conversation. This included voting through social media, an interactive GIF wall, and featuring fans’ GIFs and Vines throughout the pre-show.

Today, Twitter numbers are battling even 2011’s epic moment when Beyonce’s revealed she was pregnant.

According to Twitter data released this morning, the peak moment of the VMAs on Twitter was, not surprisingly, when Miley Cyrus performed with Robin Thicke during the show. (Cyrus also was the show’s most-mentioned star). Justin Timberlake’s performance warranted more than 219,000 tweets per minute—more than this year’s Super Bowl. When *NSYNC joined him for less than two minutes of stage time, it also gave a huge bump to the band’s online sales.

Read more about it and see the full data at Lost Remote.

Brief Take: MTV has a very active social-media audience, and utilizes that to full extent during this annual awards show. For this type of show, Twitter numbers and online mentions are becoming much more important than household ratings.

Tags:


  Save as PDF