Channel 5’s Big Brother – The Story of The Launch Show In Twitter Trends
Posted: Friday 19 August, 2011
Keredy Andrews
I didn’t expect very much of the return of Big Brother on Channel 5 and, therefore, I wasn’t disappointed! However, I felt there was a bit of geek excitement to be had in monitoring Twitter’s UK top trending topics during the live show as I was interested in finding out how long it would take for the reality show and its stars to take all ten trending slots.
The power of Twitter’s trending functionality, especially I when it comes to hashtags, is that once a topic is in the chart, people naturally gravitate to the stream and want to join in with the nationwide or worldwide conversation. A trend is visible to a huge amount of Twitter users so as people get hooked on the stream, the posts that include the hashtag or term are digested by thousands; for a brand to trend, this can be hugely helpful for awareness purposes but also potentially very damaging – chatter usually includes every conceivable opinion you could think of, good, bad and plain weird. Brands with a presence on Twitter can increase visibility by getting involved with a trending topic, but if it’s too far removed from their business area or they tweet too much, it can be viewed as being too overtly self-promotional so beware of a social backlash.
In addition, as I suspect may have happened last night, if you’re not watching a TV programme that is trending you might just switch over to see what the fuss is about – a trend can gather momentum at great speed, for a TV programme, a news issue or social hashtag ‘game’, for example #WorstFeeling is currently at number one.
The viewing figures for the one and a half hour long Celebrity Big Brother programme reached 5.1 million and the portion of those people who were talking about the show on Twitter managed to trend the show across the board in just one hour and forty five minutes.
Take a look at the figures yourself, which I monitored using http://uk.twirus.com from my mobile, by downloading this week’s Punch Social Media Intelligence Big Brother special.
