The Oscars, On Twitter: Over 1.2 Million Tweets, 388K Users Tweeting

Twitter has changed the way we watch television. Say what you will about the 83rd Annual Oscars (and thus far the consensus is “meh”), you’ve probably already said it on Twitter.  Mass Relevance and TweetReach, a Twitter analytics service with commercial access to the Twitter API, have teamed up to make a data map of yesterday’s mass conversation.

Over 20 Oscar-related terms like “Oscars,” “#Oscars,” “Academy” (but no specific names of celebrities or movies) were tracked between the hours of 5:30 and 8:45 PST during the show’s live airing. Total damage? 1,269,970 tweets, 1,663,458,778 potential impressions, and 388,717 users tweeting.

http://twitter.com/#!/TheOnion/status/42043221626466304

The honor of most retweeted tweet of the night went to The Onion with the above zinger (sorry @parislemon). And the highest tweet peak was shortly after the internet friendly Auto-Tune montage at 7:20 pm PST, clocking in 11,780.

And while that 1.6 billion impressions number may seem high, TweetReach CEO Jenn Davis tells me that the volume was actually lower than she expected, “We were prepared for big spikes, and we just didn’t see those.” Davis told me that the event paled in comparison to the Super Bowl and The Grammy, where TweetReach saw 17,000 tweets in a single minute. In contrast, the spikes topped out at 12,000 at the Oscars.

Davis guesses that this is because the movie industry has not yet found its Twitter groove, “All of the celebrities that generate a lot of the converasation on Twitter are musicians like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, so I don’t know if [The Oscars] appeals to a Twitter audience in the same way The Grammys or The Superbowl does. “

Update: Here are the top ten retweets, in order of frequency (#s below each tweet).

2963

1637

1314

1133

1091

993

965

910

891

882

Twitter has also posted their own take on The Oscars, here.
Thanks: TweetReach