Tweetdown: The O’Reilly Factor vs. The Ed Show

Bill O’Reilly and Ed Schultz go head to head at the 8pm time slot on Fox News and MSNBC.  Earlier, I covered the relative twitter activity of Maddow vs. Hannity, and we saw how Sean Hannity’s followers were much more active on Twitter than Rachel Maddow’s.

I thought it would interesting to take a quick look at Bill O’Reilly vs. Ed Schultz.  Ed implores his viewers to tweet him in a poll every day, and so I was curious if that produced a greater response.

During this week (ending 3/23/2012), you can see the relative activity of each show’s viewers:

Twitter Activity of followers of the O'Reilly Factor vs. The Ed Show

And we can see that Ed’s requests of his viewers is followed.  And that led me to my next question: outside of the time Ed’s show is playing, how active are his followers?  So I added up the number of tweets each received by the hour of the day:

Tweets by hour of day for O'Reilly and Schultz

Ed’s commanding lead in tweets comes purely from the engagement he generates from his audience during the show (the show is also on at 11pm ET, which generates a second spike towards the very end of the day).

So the winner in this Tweetdown is Ed Schultz!

Bill O’Reilly: Why not engage your viewers on twitter? Ask them to tweet you what they think of a topic each night and we’ll have a rematch!

Methodology: I looked at all tweets from 00:00 on Monday to 23:40 on Friday that had either @oreillyfactor for Bill or @edshow OR #edshow for Ed.