The Oscars and Social Media: By the Numbers

The Academy Awards have become an omni-directional media event. While hundreds of millions watch on television, the telecast is followed avidly on the web, where commentary is lively and far less scripted. For businesses contemplating the implications of this for their own communications strategies, the demographic differences are pronounced. Though not surprising, the question this raises regards trends; will web-adherent Oscars viewership become more widespread or will older viewer continue to follow it primarily on TV? From an advertising and promotional standpoint, the focus must remain on crafting an integrated multi-channel strategy that builds consistent, mutually supportive messaging.

Mashable has the data:

"The yearly Oscar telecast is no longer strictly a broadcast-only affair. The main show might still be relegated to television sets, but much of the real action took place online. Co-host James Franco wasn’t the only person tweeting during the ceremony — hundreds of thousands of others joined in, sharing their thoughts on who looked great (Christian Bale’s beard), who made waves (Melissa Leo in her acceptance speech) and who needs to host next year (Kevin Spacey, anyone?).

We’ve taken the time to synthesize the various social media related data points from the big show. Here’s how Oscar stacked up.

TV Ratings

With the lack of a major tent pole attraction like Avatar, industry analysts expected television ratings to dip for the 83rd Annual Academy Awards.

Early overnights indicate that household ratings were down 7 percent versus 2010.

The show reported a 26.5 household rating, compared with last year’s 27.5. Notably, though, the ad-targeted 18-49 demographic rating is estimated to be 14.5 — which is on par with last year’s show.

ABC managed to spin the Fast National ratings, noting that the 37.6 million viewers surpassed the Emmy Awards, Grammy Awards and Golden Globes. ABC also points out that this was the second-biggest audience since 2007.

Twitter

As with the Super Bowl, the Grammy Awards and the Golden Globes, Twitter was a prime outlet for Oscar chatter.

We’re seeing conflicting numbers as to how many total tweets were generated by the Academy Awards. Tweetbeat tells us it estimates that 400,000 tweets were sent during the telecast, whereas TweetReach pegged the total number of tweets at 1,269,790.

During the show itself, a few specific moments generated major spikes in Twitter activity.

The first moment came early in the evening, when Melissa Leo dropped Oscar’s first f-bomb during her acceptance speech for her role in The Fighter. According to TweetReach, that generated nearly 11,000 tweets at the 6:00 (PST) mark. Likewise, Tweetbeat saw an unexpected spike in tweets at the 6:01 mark.

TweetReach found that the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature (won by Inside Job), which was presented by Oprah Winfrey, resulted in the most sustained tweets of the night, 11,780.

The Movies

Liz Pullen from What the Trend analyzed data from the Twitter Worldwide Trending Topics list and compiled some interesting data in regards to trends that reached the top 10.

Despite not winning Best Picture, The Fighter earned the most “trending points” when looking at the worldwide trending topic data. Pullen assigned the film with 135 trending points compared with 115 for Toy Story 3 and 102 for the Oscar winner, The King’s Speech.

This data combined all mentions of a film, cast or crew member or award category won by the film.

Tweetbeat took a different approach, tracking film mentions and reporting Inception as the most tweeted film. The King’s Speech was second, followed by Toy Story 3, The Social Network and The Fighter.

The People

Much of the Twitter conversation surrounding the Academy Awards was less about the awards and more about the celebrities nominated, presenting or hosting the show.

James Franco — who was both a nominee for Best Actor and a co-host for the ceremony — dominated Twitter. According to metrics from Mass Relevance, Franco was the most mentioned nominee — scoring 58,197 mentions since his nomination was announced in January.

Tweetbeat agrees, stating that Franco receieved 21,117 mentions during the Oscar telecast. Co-host Anne Hathaway, was the second-most tweeted about person, according to Tweetbeat, and Natalie Portman was third.

Interestingly, this data doesn’t necessarily correlate with the Oscar personalities that appeared in Twitter’s Trending Topics list. According to Liz Pullen, Cate Blanchett was the most discussed Oscar celebrity, at least in the context of trending topics.

Our own guess is that Blanchett’s dominance may have stemmed from discussion of her dress from the Red Carpet. Tweetbeat found that Givenchy, the designer of Blanchett’s dress, was the third most tweeted designer during the Red Carpet.

Facebook

Over on Facebook, nearly one million people in the U.S. mentioned the word “Oscars” in their status updates over the last 24 hours.

The most popular U.S. Oscar-related Facebook status mentions included:

The King’s Speech with 152,324 mentions
James Franco with 138,437 mentions.
The Social Network with 96,513 mentions.
Natalie Portman with 80,704 mentions.
Anne Hathaway with 74,979 mentions.
Worldwide, nearly 1.9 million Facebook status updates were related to the Oscars.

Check In Services

GetGlue partnered with the Oscars this year, offering viewers special stickers for checking in to the event.

More than 31,000 users checked in to the OScars using GetGlue, with 10 check-ins per second taking place in the first 30 minutes of the show. This was the highest number of check-ins for any GetGlue event to date — handily beating the Grammy Awards (18,000 check-ins) and the Super Bowl (20,000 check-ins).

Sentiment Buzz

Alison Hillhouse, the senior director in MTV’s Insights & Innovations Department, monitored social media during the ceremony for various word trends. Hillhouse’s focus was primarily on the Millennials demographic, and she was able to break the moments into three basic groups: Epic, Fail and Meh.

The data found that Melissa Leo’s f-bomb, Christina Bale’s beard and Kevin Spacey were all worthy of epic praise.

Millennial’s were less impressed with the auto-tune montage, Banksy’s loss for “Best Documentary” and the snubbing of Corey Haim in the “In Memorium,” which were deemed epic failures by Millennial viewers.

On the whole, despite aggressively trying to target the younger demographic, the Oscar telecast was deemed “meh” by Millennial audiences. “Meh #Oscars” was a common refrain on both Twitter and Facebook.