If you happened to be on a social platform over the past you few weeks, and if you follow any journalists, it was difficult to avoid updates about Eurovision. If you’re unfamiliar with Eurovision, it’s a global competition to determine the best song across the continent, which dates back to 1956 — decades before American Idol, The Voice or The X Factor were even a blip of an idea. The competition even chose a .TV over a .com. The competition’s social TV footprint has grown significantly this past year.
One of the interesting integrations for this year’s competition came via a second screen experience that Amsterdam-based Angry Bytes created for Dutch broadcaster TROS which aired the competition in the Netherlands. The web app allowed you to rate in real-time the singing, song and clothing that the contestants were wearing.
“It’s a WebApp running in the Amazon Cloud,” Marc Veuger Angry Byte’s owner told Lost Remote. “We’re clicking along with TV, because it’s a live program,” he added. We asked him how the app was making the broadcast more social and he told us that, “you can judge the acts and see what your social friends and the rest of the nation are thinking about the acts,” and that, “you can also play a Europe game if you’re not interested in judging.”
We spoke with Jarmo Siim the Switzerland-based Communications Coordinator for Eurovision Family of Events for the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) who told us about the competition’s strategy with social. “Our social media strategy has been concentrating on expanding our presence in places where our fans are and showing what a great TV show we have all over the world,” Siim told Lost Remote. “We also want to give the fans an opportunity to be involved more with the contest and have thus asked for their input more and more,” he explained.
We asked about the social platforms the competition is using. “We work with all major platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, VK, Odnoklassniki, YouTube and our very own MyEurovision,” he explained. “Our social media presence has increased over 60% on a yearly basis to about 1,000,000 people.” Sweden’s Loreen, who won this year’s competition has nearly 25,000 followers on Twitter but doesn’t have a verified account.
When we asked Siim if the competition trended at all and the impact it has as a major social TV event. “We believe the Eurovision Song Contest is the best TV show on earth and believe it’s also behind our growing social media success,” he explained. “We’ve also stressed more and more the importance of being in touch with our audience to keep the success of both the TV show and our social media presence,” he added. “We have fans and viewers from all over the world – for example, we had viewers even from the Vatican city on Eurovision.tv.” He also told us that, “Eurovision Song Contest and related topics were trending in all platforms we’re using – from Twitter to Google+. And we’re truly grateful to our fans, viewers and partner for this!”
Starcom MediaVest Group London tracked the global buzz on Twitter via this infographic:
