Jon Snow Poster Drives Most ‘Game of Thrones’ Facebook Activity Since 2012

“Game of Thrones” surprised everyone this week when the teaser poster for season six featured character Jon Snow. The poster, which was released last Monday, garnered more than 1 million likes, shares and comments on Facebook, ranking as the second most engaging post for the series since 2012 (when ListenFirst began monitoring the series).

Fans, who have been speculating about Snow’s return to the series for months, took to social media over the holiday week to discuss the character’s return, writing more comments on Facebook than any other day since 2012, in addition to using the hashtag more than 57,000 times on Facebook–more than any other out-of-season program this week.

The CW’s highly anticipated “Legends of Tomorrow” shared its first look this week, drumming up more than 1 million engagements across Facebook and YouTube. While the clip generated 936,000 views on YouTube, it also drove a 2,400% increase in Facebook activity, after the video upload generated nearly 120,000 likes, shares and comments, making it the series’ second-most engaging post ever.

Provided by ListenFirst Media, DAR – TV measures what entertainment content is resonating most across Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube and Wikipedia combined. For more on the methodology behind DAR – TV, scroll to the bottom of the article.

Digital Audience Ratings (DAR) – TV
Broadcast			Monday Nov 23, 2015 – Sunday Nov 29, 2015
RANK		LAST WEEK	PROGRAM	RATING(000)
1		1	The Voice	25,833
2		2	America’s Got Talent	4,034
3		4	Empire	3,675
4		7	Dancing With The Stars	2,848
5		3	America’s Funniest Home Videos	2,845
6		5	Scream Queens	1,644
7		6	Kitchen Nightmares	1,508
8		–	Legends of Tomorrow	1,323
9		–	The Simpsons	913
10		8	The Flash	902

Cable/Streaming			Monday Nov 23, 2015 – Sunday Nov 29, 2015
RANK		LAST WEEK	PROGRAM	RATING(000)
1		1	Lip Sync Battle	6,411
2		2	Key & Peele	5,812
3		4	The Walking Dead	5,169
4		3	Top Gear	4,585
5		5	Dance Moms	3,596
6		8	Pretty Little Liars	3,161
7		10	Doctor Who	3,013
8		9	Dinotrux	2,296
9		7	Jay Leno’s Garage	2,132
10		–	Game of Thrones	1,871

Late Night			Monday Nov 23, 2015 – Sunday Nov 29, 2015
RANK		LAST WEEK	PROGRAM	RATING(000)
1		1	The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon	81,117
2		2	Jimmy Kimmel Live!	54,880
3		5	Saturday Night Live	24,865
4		4	The Late Late Show With James Corden	14,855
5		3	Conan	12,920

Jason Klein is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of ListenFirst Media, a data and analytics company providing insights for brands. ListenFirst aggregates data streams from a wide range of digital, social, and traditional marketing sources to help brands optimize business performance.

Methodology:

ListenFirst Digital Audience Ratings (DAR) for Television are a raw aggregate of daily engagements based on owned, earned and organic consumer behavior on Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, Wikipedia and YouTube. These engagements encompass metrics pertaining to audience growth, page/profile views, page-level and post-level interactions, hashtag volume and Wikipedia page views for all television program pages (which provides a proxy for organic search volume).

Organic conversation volume is calculated based on the use of official hashtags, as well as those hashtags submitted directly from programmers and distributors. Only hashtags where conversation can be isolated to a specific television program are included in the rating.

The Variety weekly leaderboards for television represent the 7-day (Monday – Sunday) sum total of DAR – TV for all episodic programming, in and out of season, from the most popular programmers (Broadcast, Cable, & Streaming Services). Sports, live events, short-form content and other non-episodic programming are excluded from this ranking cohort but available to be rated directly by ListenFirst Media.

The Broadcast and Cable/Streaming Originals leaderboards each surface the respective top ten primetime programs. The Late Night leaderboard surfaces the top five late night / variety genre programs, from across the programming universe. Streaming Originals are considered primetime cable programming.

The Trending Leaderboard surfaces the three programs that tracked the largest relative growth in DAR – TV (from the previous 7-day measurement period), and are also in the top 25% based on absolute DAR – TV, from across the programming universe.

ListenFirst monitors the official digital account owned by the program on each aforementioned platform (except for Wikipedia, where the title-specific profile is considered official). Only the U.S. version of a program’s digital presence is monitored; for platforms that support regional profiles like Facebook, the “Global” profile is considered the U.S. profile. Only profiles that can be attributed to the specific program contribute to the rating (i.e. engagements that happen on the profile facebook.com/LouieFX are tracked, while engagements that happen on facebook.com/FX are not). For YouTube, in addition to any program-specific presence, content related to the program in question that originated on the parent company’s official YouTube channel is considered.

Note: Twitter data has been removed from Digital Audience Ratings (DAR) for Television as of 10/7/2014.

For other questions pertaining to methodology, contact ListenFirst Media.

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