Last weekend, iHeartRadio’s music awards beat out “The Walking Dead” and Nickelodeon’s “Kids Choice Awards,” both long running, social stand-outs. While Nickelodeon made it in tweet volume, iHeartRadio drove 14 billion impressions in total, which meant they beat a personal record by increasing from last year’s 8.5 billion.
The success of the newbie awards (and newbie platform, really) is just being everywhere anyone under the age of 34 is. iHeartRadio used Periscope for behind the scenes just a few days after its launch and experimented with social integrations like “Our Story” on Snapchat, where fans and celebs like Ryan Seacrest got involved on the red carpet. But it was also just about grassroots efforts, if you will, to get people involved. Chris Williams, Chief Product Officer for iHeartRadio told me in an email that:
The main driver of our social success [this weekend] was our local radio stations and personalities (which reach 93 percent of Millennials monthly) engaging in a live, real-time conversation with fans as the awards aired. These are our pop culture influencers and the social media outlets acted as the bridge to help connect these shared experience among music fans, influencers, stations and artists who all watched the Awards together from across the country. We used our social accounts as the second screen experience.
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Williams is right in looking at the television and social accounts as first and second screens interchangeable. In terms of tweet volume, legacy awards shows still have the upper hand. But outsider status drives conversation — as does Taylor Swift and Justin Timberlake having a moment. Either way, it’s worth remembering that you don’t have to be a known factor to get people talking. Next year, we won’t even remember that you didn’t even really know what iHeartRadio did.