As reported previously, Piers Morgan and his team at CNN pursued an aggressive social media strategy to pull in viewers for Monday’s debut episode of Piers Morgan Tonight. The strategy included much live-tweeting, Facebook-posting and virtual badge-giving. But did it work?
The ratings, at least, were positive: 2.1 million viewers tuned in for Monday’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, according to numbers obtained from the show’s publicist. Another 1.27 million viewers watched Tuesday night’s episode with Howard Stern. Together, that’s a 160% increase in viewership compared to what Larry King Live pulled in last quarter (675,000).
The audience is also proportionately younger than King’s, particularly on the second night, when 43% (551,000) of the audience was made up of individuals in the 24 to 54 age category. Only 25% (170,000) of those who tuned in during King’s last season fell in that age bracket.
Reception on the social web has also been positive. According to social media measurement platform Trendrr, overall sentiment across news sites, Twitter and the blogosphere was largely positive (63%) during the show and in the two hours following the premiere Monday; 2% of posts citing Piers Morgan in that time frame were negative, while 35% were neutral.
Interestingly enough, tweets that mentioned Piers Morgan (“Piers Morgan,” @piersmorgan, #pierstonight, etc.) were incredibly positive (84%) the day of the premiere, while tweets that mentioned both Piers Morgan and CNN were still favorable (56%), but not by nearly the same margin.
While we can’t definitively prove that Morgan’s use of social media is responsible for the interest among a younger demographic, we suspect the attention he has generated on those platforms does have something to do with it. At the very least, the tweeting and blogging denizens of the web are responding positively to his efforts.
Image courtesy of CNN
More About: media, piers morgan, piers morgan tonight, social media, twitter
