One of the more amazing things about Twitter is when there’s a huge variance between a show’s official Nielsen rating and activity on Twitter. Take Piers Morgan, for example. His show, compared against other cable news shows in his slot, averages about 3rd out of 4 shows. Sometimes #2, sometimes #4, but never #1.
But on Twitter, Piers is the king. Many days he has more mentions during the day than any other cable news show at at time during the day. You can look through the recent Cable New Twitter Ratings to see how well he’s done. That kind of dominance on Twitter is mystifying. And so I decided to take a look.
Piers himself is a fairly frequent user of Twitter:
This helps a lot — he generate a lot of buzz just by being on Twitter a lot.
And a healthy portion of the conversation is to him, not just about him:
When we look at what words appear most often in the mentions, we start to get a sense of what the conversation is about:
Wenger and Ramsey relate to UK football, which tells us an awful lot.
And, indeed, when we categorize the tweets that mention Piers, the break down the following fashion:
| Navy Yard / Guns | 52% |
| Sports (Soccer) | 38% |
| Other | 10% |
A majority of the mentions are in reaction to the discussions about the Navy Yard shootings and gun control. But more than a third of them are about football in the UK, and only 10% are on other topics. The conversation with and about Piers is very, very focused on Twitter — unusually so.
This may also explain why his volume of mentions seems disproportionately high compared to his ratings. The 38% who want to talk to him about UK football are most likely not in the USA and therefore not counted in ratings (if they watch him at all). And of the 52% who are chatting about gun control, a large portion of them oppose Piers’ viewpoints; one may surmise that those folks are watching Fox News and not CNN.
There’s no doubt that Piers is an incredibly effect social media user. By having some hot topic issues, he’s able to hold a much larger audience on Twitter than other, much more popular news hosts can. Kudos to Piers.