6 Stats That Show How Game of Thrones Slayed Social Media in the U.S. and Beyond

The social media build up to Sunday night's Game of Thrones season six premiere was colossal, and the buzz certainly didn't stop while it aired on HBO. We asked a couple data providers for figures around the show, and below are the 6 we found most interesting. 1. HBO brand buzzes Data from Spredfast shows that from Friday through Sunday, there were more than 829,000 Twitter mentions of HBO, Game of Thrones (or #GOT), HBO Go and HBO Now. People used #GOT 602,000 times in that timeframe, while HBO earned 248,000 mentions. This was a huge spike from the previous weekend, where all of the aforementioned terms generated 252,000 mentions. But some of it was probably negative—as HBO Now suffered from temporary streaming glitches that angered many users. 2. Posts were aplenty, like Lannister gold According to social media analytics company Talkwalker, the show generated more than 1.5 million social posts in the last week. During the hour of the show, nearly 200,000 interactions happened on social, with spikes at the open and close. "This engagement period is a great time for advertisers to take advantage of this pivotal time to target engaged or focused audiences with targeted ads that relate to the audiences interests," suggested Marissa Cazem, U.S. public relations and communications director at Talkwalker. "Take this time to offer a special promotion to users, such as a contest to win a free product if viewers can name the first character to be killed off of the show within a given timeframe." 3. It slayed on the East and West Coast Game of Thrones was especially popular in New York and California, which Talkwalker found each generated more than 66,000 mentions. 4. A blizzard of mentions The most popular character? Naturally, Jon Snow. "Snow" and "Jon Snow" led mentions of any character on social media, according to Talkwalker. (See chart below.) Mentions of Daenerys Targaryen rose 180.2 percent, while Melisandre was a new trending theme. 5. Spotify pops Globally, viewers were talking about way more than just Jon Snow. Talkwalker data shows that Spotify generated a lot of conversation from its Game of Thrones integration, allowing users to determine which character they'd be, based on their playlists. The effort, dubbed #SpotifyGameOfThrones, garnered 14,800 mentions. 6. Global impact: Southern Europe and Southwest Asia While 1.1 million of those mentions this week came from the U.S., Game of Thrones was a huge hit in countries such as Spain and Italy. But what about in India, where users see all the drama without any of the sex and only some of the violence? Well, there were more social mentions coming from India than Indiana, Georgia and Massachusetts, among several other states. Talkwalker found that users in India generated more than 32,300 Game of Thrones mentions this week—23,000 on Sunday and Monday alone. In firewalled China, where the show is heavily edited to take out scenes featuring sex or violence, people still generated more than 1,300 mentions this week on social media.

Performance Marketing

6 Stats That Show How Game of Thrones Slayed Social Media in the U.S. and Beyond

HBO's brand got a ton of buzz

Justin Lafferty

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Justin Lafferty