The Whole Wide World Wants to Find Olivia Pope

By Karen Fratti 

olivia pope scandal premiereAs predicted, Shondaland fans were on Twitter in droves last night for the return of the Thursday lineup. While Nielsen tries to figure out exactly how many people were watching, Twitter has already started visualizing their data with their usual heat map.

As you can see, it was a busy night, with North America practically lit up for the full three hours of programming. The map includes some early and late fringe, tracking tweets from 7:30 p.m. until 11:30 p.m.  Western Europe stayed up late, too, supposedly just tracking where Olivia Pope was on social media. There’s some activity around India and Pakistan, Indonesia, and Brazil.

If you scroll to the first five minutes of the nine ‘o’clock hour, the opening of “Scandal,” you’ll be surprised that anyone did anything on Twitter besides just lines of exclamation points and crying emoji faces.

In all, a successful social campaign for ABC yesterday, with cast, crew, and Shonda Rhimes herself presiding over her tribe. What’s weird about #TGIT is that more brands and advertisers aren’t trying to sell or give things away. There are no calls to action — just a lot of “OMGs” and commiserating.

Update: Nielsen is out with the final numbers and 738,000 Tweets were sent by 192,000 people in total about “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal,” and “How to Get Away with Murder” on ABC.

Advertisement