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.

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So I threw a few Comedy Central shows into the mix since they deal with current events and, really, are just as newsy as some other programs.  I added Key & Peele in for fun, since tonight was their season kick-off.

Holy Moly, did Key and Peele score high.  Yes, they were live tweeting the show, but still, wow.  They had more tweets, for a half-hour show, in their time slot than any other program on cable news.  Let’s see if next week does the same for them.  

In terms of over all daily tweets, Piers Morgan seems to still be the champ.  The man knows how to spark a debate.

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This is the first ratings report where I’ve estimated the gender breakdown of the audience. You can see the links at the end for more information on how this is done.

There’s some interesting things to observe about the mixture of people who tweet news shows.  First, in general, more men than women seem to tweet at shows.  I do; I guess we’re the grumpy grandpas shouting at the TV…

The second thing is the gender distribution for the various networks.  If you look at Fox News, you won’t find a show that gets a larger female response than male response.  The other networks have an ebb and flow based upon the show.  I’ll do a more thorough analysis in the future, but it appears on the surface that on the Male to Female spectrum, the networks run Fox, CNN, MSNBC, HLN.  It will be a while before I have enough data to declare something a trend, though.

On to the ratings for the 17th…

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Piers Morgan is crushing it again.  I really must do an analysis to figure out what his tweeps are talking about.

Also, today saw the debut of Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Fox and Friends.  The show came on strong on Twitter with its new hashtag, #BetterWithFriends.  It’s probably better with Elisabeth, to be fair.

Given the day’s events in Washington DC, it should be no surprise that the shooting was a big aspect of what was being talked about on Twitter; nearly 25% of all tweets that mentioned a cable news show also mentioned “shoot” (or variants), “navy”, or “murder”.  “Syria”, on the other hand, was in about 2% of the tweets. Many more people mentioned “Hasselbeck”. And Obamacare.  Of course, nobody was talking about the debt limit…

Here’s the numbers for the day:

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The ides of September were good to MHP Show, as it continued to dominate twitter during the day.  But the reality is that only MHP and Up with Steve Kornacki even try, it seems…

Top Shows for the day:

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