RNC Tops TV Twitters

Not surprisingly, the most-tweeted-about TV show Thursday night was the Republican National Convention coverage -- on various networks -- which drew 2,008,000 tweets from 470,000 unique authors, according to Nielsen Social's Daily Top Five.

Those tweets spiked at 10:48, during the acceptance speech of GOP nominee Donald Trump, when he promised to "fix the system," said Nielsen.

Rounding out the list were CBS's Big Brother at No. 2 with 52,000 tweets from 15,000 uniques; CBS' The Late Show With Stephen Colbert (Trump's speech was the lead-in and Jon Stewart made a special appearance, which drew its own tweetstorm later), with 23,000 tweets from 16,000 uniques; Comedy Central's At Midnight with Chris Hardwick with 11,000 from 4,000 uniques; and Fox's season finale of Bones with 10,000 and 3,000 uniques.

A portion of the Bones episode was reportedly pre-empted on the West Coast, so that number could have been affected by that, either prompting more tweets from unhappy fans or fewer, given there was less show to comment on on the West Coast.

Tweets about the shows are captured from three hours before through three hours after each initial broadcast. Unique authors are defined as having a unique Twitter account that sent "at least one tweet ascribed to a specific TV episode."

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.