A major push to expand mobile and social media efforts for
the second season Love & Hip Hop
Atlanta on VH1 paid off with very strong on-air ratings as well as
significant social media and mobile traffic for VH1 Digital, company executives
said.
The second season saw a number of expanded digital efforts,
including the Check Yourself digital
series that drew 1.7 million streams, social hashtag battles and a new Love & Hip Hop ATL Social
Leaderboard in partnership with Social Toaster.
"The first season became the most social show of the summer
of 2012," noted Dan Sacher, senior VP of digital for VH1 and Logo. "So the goal in the
second season was to build on that and create not just a one-hour experience
[for TV and digital during the live airing] but create a social and mobile
seven day a week experience."
As part of that effort, they produced new digital episodes
of the Check Yourself, which showed
talent reacting to scenes from the week's episode. Those digital episodes
produced 1.7 million streams and helped drive significant social media
activity.
Twitter volume per minute ranged from 9,611 for the May 27episode to 20,775 on June 17 and 14,275 on July 1, with a high of 26,939
tweets per minute for the second season premiere on April 22. "Those are
numbers that you might see for a huge pop cultural live event," said Sam Blake
Hofstetter, director of social media for VH1. "A good night for many shows is
in the 1,200 range."
Unique tweeters also ranged from 206,566 to a high of
640,637 in various episodes and tweets per user were much higher than they
typically show. Tweets per unique typically ranged from 3 to 4.5 during each
episode. "The typical prime time show might get one or two tweets per unique,"
he adds.
To help drive that activity, the show featured hashtag
battles, using Mass Relevance data, and set up a Social Leaderboard.
Users of the Leaderboard collected points for re-tweets,
linking pages, recruiting friends and other activities that they could then use
to compete for weekly prizes and a grand prize for the season.
Cast members were also extremely active on social media to
help boost traffic, Sacher said.
This paid off in ratings. The second season of the show,
which wrapped up on July 1, was the No. 1 cable show on Monday nights in its
time period and in primetime among adults and women ages 18 to 34, 18 to 49 and
25 to 54, if sports and specials were excluded. The data covers April 22 to
June 24 for live plus seven day viewing, VH1 executives reported.
Mobile activity also saw a significant bounce during the
show's run. Following the premiere in April, VH1 had 1.8 million mobile
visitors, up 49% from a year earlier.
VH1 digital also reported that users were
streaming more video on mobile devices, with 820,000 streams in May 2013, up
120% from a year earlier. VH1 executives said that Love & Hip Hop Atlanta drove the lion's share of that growth.
