AMC’s “Breaking Bad” was ruled the list of the Top Ten series on Twitter this past season, according to new data released Monday by Nielsen.
On average, around 6 million distinct Twitter accounts saw one or more of the 521,000 tweets sent out on average about a new episode of the series.
“The Walking Dead,” “Pretty Little Liars,” “The Bachelor,” and “Game of Thrones” rounded out the top five series.
“Breaking Bad” also set a record for the greatest reach of a single episode airing when tweets about the September finale reached 9.1 million unique users over the course of the night.
Twitter seemed to be especially popular among viewers of reality competitions this past season. Fans of “The Voice” set a record for the total number of tweets in one minute when 310,000 people posted about the show at 8:59pm ET on May 13, which surpassed even the Super Bowl.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, awards shows led the pack for specials, with The GRAMMY’s and The Oscars scoring the biggest Twitter hits, with the Emmy’s trailing behind in the number eight spot on the list.
And The Super Bowl took the crown for most tweets total, with 25.3 million messages sent out about the annual matchup on the Gridiron.
Of note: Nielsen only measures Twitter data for the users who see a tweet during an original broadcast, or for the three hours before or after the airing. So there’s no taking into account viewers who DVRed an episode of their favorite show to watch later in the week. The methodology tends to favor special events and sports programming, since viewers are more likely to watch those shows live.
Read More: Nielsen
Brief Take: Nielsen’s data seems to state the obvious: ratings winners and major special events dominate online conversation. But the picture would probably change if Nielsen adopted a broader methodology.
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