Updated: This year’s Oscars broadcast fell 10% in the ratings over last year, drawing 37.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen. But those numbers are higher than the 2008 and 2009 Oscars broadcasts.
Combine those numbers with tweets, and that’s where things get interesting. TweetReach and MassRelevance say 388,717 people sent 1,269,970 tweets about the Oscars during the show — that means just 1% of Oscars viewers were tweeting about the broadcast.
But Twitter has some different numbers. During the entire show, 36.4 million tweets were sent, compared to 38.5 million for the Super Bowl, Twitter says. It looks like TweetReach is measuring tweets that mention the Oscars specifically, where Twitter is looking at all the tweets sent during the broadcast.
Meanwhile, the second-biggest spike of the night occurred when the broadcast plugged the #Oscars hashtag on air. “Even in a show as big as the Academy Awards, this technique – so simple, so low-tech – really works: put a hashtag on TV and people will start talking about it immediately,” writes Twitter’s Robin Sloan.
According to TweetReach, the biggest tweet spike occurred during the auto-tune segment with Oprah following immediately after. Here’s the TweetReach infographic on the night.