Note that all times are US Eastern Time. See notes at end for further explanations. For earlier articles on cable news twitter ratings, please see this.
| Category | Mentions | Show |
| Most Mentions During Hour | 1735 | MSNBC: Melissa Harris-Perry Show |
| Most Mentions During day | 3954 | MSNBC: Melissa Harris-Perry Show |
Interesting that even though the Melissa Harris-Perry show won best hour and the over all day, MSNBC came in third place as a network….
Up Late w/ Alec Baldwin did fairly well last night, but the interesting thing is how female his Twitter audience skews (62%). If you look at the gender mix during the evening, MSNBC stays fairly balanced until Baldwin comes on, and then it shifted female. Maybe that’s because of his guest, Debra Winger? We’ll have to see if the trend keeps up over the weeks to come. If it does, then it represents a sort of ratings challenge: one show (Maddow, which was 51% female) will struggle to be a strong lead into another (Baldwin) if it has a significantly different gender balance.
I had wondered if there would be a competition between Baldwin and Maher, but maybe the demographics are keeping that from happening? The stats suggest that the men are watching Maher (70% male) and the women Baldwin (62% female). Yes, that’s a simplification, but I think there may be a kernel of insight in that: Baldwin’s show is almost Charlie Rose-like: probing questions but no conflict, while Bill Maher is all about conflict.
If the holds up, we can definitely say that Baldwin is looking for love in all the right places (slightly obscure Debra Winger joke).
Well … so much for the shutdown. Rachel Maddow’s live broadcast at midnight picked up a bit of traffic, but not enough to display The Ed Show from its usual perch as having the best hour of any show. Piers Morgan also won his usual best in day slot.
MSNBC and CNN got the most mentions, with Fox News getting far fewer.
The great thing is that this should, hopefully, clear up CNN’s strange 11pm broadcasts, Shutdown Showdown, which had no discernable social media component.
Nothing like a good democratic victory to boost MSNBC, and Chris Hayes was the winner of his hour and the day on Twitter on Wednesday. Chris had (disjoint) two live hours, and the dialog during and between the showings allowed him to achieve a first for #inners.
(To be fair, Rachel Maddow had a second live hour at midnight ET, but that fell into Thursday for my rankings. However, that was under 600 additional mentions, and would not have affected the rankings at all if counted with Wednesday.)
MSNBC won the overall network rankings, with Fox News in third place. Clearly, the left was a lot more happy and talkative tonight.
Kudos to Chris for propelling his show and network to the front!