On Thursday, August 18 the globally popular reality TV show, Big Brother, returned to the UK screens on a new channel with a Celebrity version. Integrated PR, SEO and social media agency, Punch Communications, monitored Twitter trends for two hours from when the first programme started at 9pm BST.
The exploration into the trends involved recording the Big Brother related terms and positions via uk.twirus.com at the hour and then seven, 15, 22, 30, 37, 45 and 52 minutes past, until 11pm BST. Visit http://bit.ly/o3xDEv to download the full statistics in a special edition of Punch’s weekly Social Media Intelligence.
Viewing figures reached a massive 5.1 million for the one and a half hour live show and a large portion of this audience was responsible for getting Big Brother and its housemates to trend on Twitter in all ten slots within just one hour and forty-five minutes; the last non-BB topic to be ousted from the top ten, at position ten, was ‘Sky News’.
At first, only the term ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ was trending in slot two but by 9.07pm the first hashtag appeared at number four in the list, which was ‘#CBB’. The hashtag that the official Big Brother profile (@bbuk) was promoting, ‘#bbuk’, was the next term to trend at quarter past nine but by then ‘#CBB’ had moved up to number one, where it remained, at least until Punch’s monitoring had finished. Even though the official profile had pre-planned to create a buzz with a hashtag, ‘#bbuk’ only managed to trend in the third to sixth place slots over the two hours, which proves that the power is firmly in the hands of the Twitterati.
Keredy Andrews, Senior Account Manager at social media, PR and SEO Agency, Punch Communications, explains: “The official Big Brother profile did exactly the right thing in promoting a hashtag in tweets during the run up to the first show being aired. However, it was the UK’s Twitter users that decided to go with ‘#CBB’ instead of ‘#bbuk’ as their hashtag of choice but interestingly, neither of these were in the trending list the following day and ‘#BB’ was.”
The top trending topics also gave immediate insight into the most discussed housemates, as audience members chattered about the celebrities who are spending up to three weeks in the house. The presenter, Brian Dowling, was the first person to trend at 9.22pm with the term ‘Brian’. This was closely followed at 10.37pm by ‘Tara’, the American actress Tara Reid, who continued to trend until 11pm and beyond, as did Amy Childs (‘Amy’) who hit the top ten at 10.45pm.
Keredy continues: “As I was monitoring the top trends on Thursday evening, I was particularly interested in seeing which of the housemates were being discussed on Twitter and Tara was clearly the most popular, whether that was for positive or negative reasons. ‘Jedward’ began trending quite quickly once they appeared on the show, as I expected, but I was particularly surprised that Kerry Katona didn’t get a look in the top ten trends.
“When a topic, hashtag or person’s name that is related to a specific TV show trends, it is very powerful and can gather massive momentum in a matter of minutes. I am sure that many Twitter users who were not watching Big Brother would have seen the trends and switched over the TV to see what the fuss was about; Twitter is a wonderful digital PR platform and certainly the TV ratings’ friend.”
For more information on Punch Communications, visit www.punchcomms.com or follow @punchcomms and facebook.com/punchcommunications.
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