Kelly, Kelly — It was all Megyn on Tuesday as she won best hour and best day. That’s not really surprising anymore.  But what’s interesting is that it would have been completely surprising a year ago.  What happened?

First, here’s the other top shows for the day (as rated by “best hour”):

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Kelly didn’t just win — she’s in a league by herself. So how does she do it? How does she get nearly 3 times the buzz of her time-slot competitor, Rachel Maddow?  Certainly, Kelly’s getting more than 3x the ratings is the main reason.  But if we look at Twitter, we can see that MSNBC’s problem is deeper than that.  A year ago, Rachel Maddow was getting twice the mentions on Twitter that Kelly got. What’s happened in the course of a year?

Let’s look at how Kelly and Fox News worked Twitter on Tuesday:

• Fox News sent out 12 tweets that mention The Kelly File.
• Megyn Kelly sent out 18 tweets herself.

As a result:

• The show had nearly 10K mentions throughout the day.
• More than half (54%) of the show’s mentions are retweets.  That generates a lot of buzz without their fans having to do a lot of work.
• 25 tweets made up over 20% of all tweets (because of retweets).
• Retweets of Megyn Kelly or Fox News made up about 22% of all tweets

Fox News’ strategy is to have Megyn personally and the network corporately drive the conversation about her show non-stop.  This sets off a chain reaction that creates a huge volume of buzz.

Compare this to how Maddow and MSNBC work. On Tuesday:

• MSNBC sent out NO tweets that mentioned her.
• @Maddow sent out NO tweets.  (The Ed Show, by comparison, sent out 50 tweets on Tuesday — but also had no mentions by @MSNBC).
• @MaddowBlog (why does she need a second account if the first is barely used?) sent out 3.
• @MaddowApp (wait, she has a third account because the first two aren’t enough?) sent out 8 tweets.

To be clear, I didn’t just pick an anomalous day.  This is very typical. As a result:

• The show had about 3.7K mentions throughout the day.
• Retweets of @Maddow, @MaddowBlog, and @MaddowApp are about 10% of all tweets.

MSNBC’s Twitter strategy seems to be “talk amongst yourselves”. There’s no match being put to the kindling.  And as a result, for all intents and purposes, Rachel Maddow does not exist on Twitter.

This is symptomatic of a much larger problem at MSNBC.  Let’s look at what each network has been talking about over the past several weeks to see where they put their focus.  Here’s the tag cloud for @FoxNews:

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Fox News has been focusing on ISIS, Ebola, and the Kelly File with a little Hannity sprinkled in.  And it’s worked — Kelly and Hannity are doing great.

Here’s what MSNBC’s tag cloud has looked like:

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If the Global Citizen Festival were MSNBC’s marquee program,  it could be a disciplined focus on their lineup.  But since GCF was a one-off, all that social media work is useless now.  It’s a sunk cost in a now worthless investment.  In fact, apart from Ferguson, their focus seems to be on their one-off specials. @MSNBC makes essentially no effort to promote its own regular shows.

I would say that MSNBC’s social media strategy is diffuse, unfocused, and a failure, but that’s presuming they have a strategy.  MSNBC needs to learn how to use social media to protect its brand and grow its franchises.  Until then, it will be constantly outrun by its more agile competitor, Fox News.

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Kelly and Hannity were the winners on Monday.  First, the chart of the top 30 shows, and then afterwards an interesting observation:

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I noticed something interesting when I looked at the top ranked show for each network:

For the big networks, 9pm is the best time in the day for all of them on Twitter, despite 8pm being considered the “most important time slot” (per Mediaite).  I’m not sure what that really means — perhaps viewers have their devices in front of them at 9pm but not 8?

Here’s the raw numbers for the day: 2014-10-13-ShowStats.csv

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Melissa Harris-Perry won best hour and CNNi best day, as is typical for Sundays.  MHP’s 11am hour was followed by Kornacki @ 9am, MHP @ 10am, Kornacki @ 8am, and Judge Jeanine @ 9pm.

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As you can see from the chart, on Sunday Cable News Twitter belongs to the morning line-up on MSNBC and drifts away pretty quickly after that.

Raw data for the day: 2014-10-12-ShowStats.csv

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Another strong Saturday for Fox News’ Cashin’ In, which won both best hour and best day.  Following Cashin’ In for best hour were both hours of Harris-Perry, Kornacki, and Judge Jeanine:

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As you can see, the difference between Cashin’ In and the rest is leaps and bounds.  How do they do this? How is a half-hour show’s engagement 4 times better than its closest competitor, which runs for a full hour? Apart from the primary answer (more viewers who are more passionate about the show), here’s what is happening:

• It is NOT the same tweet over and over again.  There were 2753 different tweets that made up the 4815.  The most retweeted got 43 retweets.  It was not stuffing the ballot box, so to speak.  I thought “Aha!” when Eric Bolling said (roughly) “retweet this if you agree”, but that wasn’t it.
• There are some very active participants.  1260 people sent tweets. Two people (DinahLord and ladydshops) sent over 100 each, and 5 others sent over 50.
• Some of the show participants are very active during the hour.  Jonathan Hoenig sent 63 tweets, Michelle Fields 12, and Eric Bolling 7.

So congratulations to Cashin’ In for simply being the best at social media.

Data files for the day:

Counts for all shows: 2014-10-11-ShowStats.csv
Ranked list of senders of Cashin’ In tweets during 11am ET hour: 2014=10-11 Cashin In Senders.csv

Due to twitter restrictions, I cannot republish data for all the tweets sent during the hour. As a compromise, here are the top 10 most retweeted tweets:

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I had expected the ALMA awards, which were broadcast on MSNBC last night, to win best hour and best day, so I was surprised this morning to see that Hannity won best hour and CNNi won best day.  It’s not that the ALMA awards didn’t generate some traffic, but they were in fifth place for best hour, after Hannity, Ed Show, Kelly File, and Hayes.  They were in third place for best day, after CNNi and Hannity (and ahead of The Five and Susteren).

Here’s the rankings of the shows based upon their broadcast hour:

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You can see the raw data here: 2014-10-10-ShowStats.csv

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