I see a lot of speculation re: why we didn’t trend this afternoon. Here’s my theory–we didn’t reach what Twitter terms “widespread popularity,” essentially meaning that although we had lots of individual tweets, we didn’t have enough unique accounts tweeting. (See Twitter’s explanation for this here: http://t.co/xdWlyamZ6J)
The total number of tweets AND the total number of accounts BOTH matter in terms of establishing & continuing a trend. Even with a lot of people tweeting, Twitter requires something to have either:
1] NEVER have been a trending topic before or 2] be a topic that’s become popular with a whole new group of people.
Furthermore, Twitter is structured so that even when some topics continue to get an influx of tweets, they are still removed from the Trending Topics list because no new people begin tweeting about them.
Twitter’s algorithm counts how many people are tweeting about something—not just the total number of tweets. In other words, the same person tweeting #HelpHannibal 120 times can be counted, in Twitter’s eyes, as one person tweeting repeatedly, not 120 tweets toward the trend.
Another potential issue: Twitter doesn’t show all tweets in search results. What tweets don’t show up if you click #HelpHannibal? The ones from profiles with no name/bio, the ones from brand spankin’ new accounts, the ones with no tweets prior to the trend, & if no one has ever responded to or retweeted your tweets.
Where does this leave us? I don’t know, I’ll leave that up to the Fannibal Twitter mavens, but these are some legitimate reasons why #HelpHannibal didn’t trend today, just to clear up a little bit of speculation & anxiety. <3
Heyo, professional social media manager here. For the record, while trending on Twitter is of course a great way to gain widespread attention and definitely helps the cause, it’s certainly not going to be the only thing any company interested in acquiring the show will look at.
Twitter’s in-house search is the pits. It’s there as a convenience to its users, not as a meaningful data point. Any media company seriously interested in shelling out a large amount of cash for a property will most likely be doing their homework on the property’s social media presence using some kind of social analytics package. This will give them a MUCH more accurate look at number of tweets, number of accounts tweeting, their follower counts, reach, hashtags, mentions, and even URLs circulating in the tweets.
They are most likely harvesting information about other social media platforms as well. But the reason Twitter is so uniquely important in these things is because Twitter makes its entire social stream (known as the ‘firehose’) available to analytics companies, enabling them to provide uniquely complete information about Twitter performance, whereas Facebook, Tumblr and other platforms are more protectivist about their data.
I would assume, though I can’t say for sure, that Hannibal’s production company is also tracking that data, hopefully to make it available as part of their pitch to potential buyers.
What companies do with the social analytics they harvest varies drastically. More traditional companies and companies whose primary communications/media delivery channels don’t lie on social media tend to value it less. Companies like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon basically survive on it, and will presumably consider a strong social showing a promising selling point. (If they don’t, then I question their chances of long-term survival.)
Unfortunately my area of focus is not TV media, so I don’t know specifics on the back end of things when it comes to stuff like the specifics of Nielsen Ratings calculations, how companies get online viewer stats, etc. But I do know that the Nielsen Ratings continue to fall down when it comes to online-only viewership (which, incidentally, trends young). Someone more familiar with that industry could probably tell you more, but it seems to me that a campaign or hashtag for Hannibal fans who watch primarily or solely online (like myself; I don’t even have a cable subscription) to speak up and demonstrate the strength of that demographic might provide them with some revealing (and hopefully appealing) information.
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