In retrospect, it seems unfair to have pit the VMAs against the Emmys in a contrived social TV battle.
According to Nielsen Social, the VMAs are the most social event of the summer across all television with over 12.6 million tweets. The event also generated a total of 259 trending topics. Combined across Vine, Tumblr, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, MTV saw nearly 63 million social interactions during the night of the show.
MTV’s success isn’t just limited to social, or to the night of the show. The network posted the full show online Monday morning, drawing in over 7 million streams within 24 hours. On the mobile front, the MTV app saw its largest day of visitors and installs to date.
More, the VMAs weren’t just a victory for MTV but also for Twitter and MTV sponsors. According to Amobee Intelligence, in the six hours leading up to and including the VMAs, there were two sponsors, Taco Bell and Trojan who had at least 9,000 tweets mentioning them. In the six hours leading up to and including the Emmys telecast, though, there only one sponsor – Samsung – generated that many tweets.
Below, two infographics from StatSocial that illustrate what each award shows’ audience was tweeting about throughout. CoverGirl, Ellen, and H&M may not have been major sponsors garnering fan tweets, but these brands were able to organically jump into the Twitter conversation, becoming fan favorites on both award nights.
