‘Parks And Recreation’ Finale Draws Fond Farewell In Twitter TV Ratings
The finale of Parks And Recreation proved as much a winner in Nielsen’s Twitter TV ratings as it was on the broadcast side, topping the week’s series and specials with more than 4.6 million people reached by 346,000 tweets.
On the sports side, Ronda Rousey’s 14-second win over not-very-challenging challenger Cat Zingano punched through most of the online/on-air competition, ending third behind two NBA games but ahead of five others as well as a big matchup in European soccer’s UEFA Champions Cup playoffs.
Nielsen measures the unduplicated audience of people who see tweets about a show during its initial broadcast and for three hours before and after. This past week, The Walking Dead continued to lurch along near the top, as did two episodes of The Voice and another of The Bachelor. All those shows have been regular visitors to the weekly top 10s, their big audiences also taking regularly to Twitter to talk about the programs.
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Notable additions include that ratings wunderkind, Fox’s Empire, which has been setting all kinds of records in its first several shows. As big as the show has been on air, it has promise to build an empire online too, a la what Shonda Rhimes has done with her Thursday-night triumvirate on ABC, including this week’s No. 7, How To Get Away With Murder.
The other notable additions this week include yet another awards show, The BET Honors 2015, pushing into the No. 8 spot from the relatively small BET network, and Catfish: The TV Show from MTV. Both MTV and VH1 consistently seem able to punch above their weight on social, thanks to their smartphone-wielding young audiences.
On the sports side, the NBA put a press on most other competition, bested only by the UFC Rousey match, and British power Manchester City’s first leg of its home-and-home soccer playoff against perennial Spanish powerhouse Barcelona, part of the pan-European club championships run by UEFA.
Also of interest is how many of the games making the top 10 from the NBA this week involve the Oklahoma City franchise. The Thunder, normally one of the league’s best teams, has been scuffling for the last playoff spot in the NBA’s Western Conference, hobbled by lengthy injuries to its star players, including former MVP Kevin Durant. Despite its small market and big challenges, the team is getting a lot of attention, on air and off.
As always, Nielsen includes a raft of caveats and explanations with its numbers, to wit:
Nielsen Social captures relevant Tweets from three hours before through three hours after broadcast, local time. Unique Audience measures the audience of relevant Tweets ascribed to a program from when the Tweets are sent until the end of the broadcast day at 5am. Sports Events include those on Broadcast and National Cable Networks only across all day parts. For multicast events, networks are listed alphabetically and metrics reflect the highest Unique Audience across all airing networks.
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