Newsaccess Insight: Ellen’s Oscar Selfie versus Linda & Billy’s Late Late Spat
Well... that escalated quickly. The drama that unfolded as Ireland chose its next Eurovision Song Contest entrant on Friday night certainly took twitter by surprise.
#LateLate is one of the most active television hashtags amongst Irish twitter users, but the accusations and drama of Eurosong 2014 added significant amounts of activity to the trend over the weekend.
In total last Friday’s show from 9.30pm, saw 6180 tweets relating to the Late Late Show and #Eurosong.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the confrontation between Euro-veteran Linda Martin and Billy McGuiness from Aslan lead to the peak at 10.45pm.
On a global scale, no entertainment show is bigger than the Academy Awards, and this year proved to be bigger than ever, pushing twitter to new highs.
Host Ellen DeGeneres gauged public attitudes to social media perfectly by arranging a Selfie with some of the world’s biggest movie stars, bumping the #Oscars trend to a record breaking peak, crashing twitter for a time and clocking up 2.3 million retweets.
In Ireland, the Oscars attracted a massive amount of activity on Twitter. Between 10pm on Sunday and 5am on Monday the event generated 5,178 tweets here – a fraction of the global figure, but impressive nonetheless.
So, how do National television events compare with International extravaganzas? The Late Late drama certainly exceeded the Oscars in terms of volume of tweets here in Ireland. But the overriding conclusion is that once again content wins on Twitter. The drama of the Late Late vs. the wow factor of the Oscars Selfie proved a hit on twitter and that’s the key to gaining traction.
If only Linda and Billy had taken a selfie after their ‘moment’. They could have crashed twitter themselves.
Paul Moriarty is Head of Insight at Newsaccess Media Intelligence. Newsaccess is the leading provider of media monitoring and media analysis service in Ireland. For more information on Newsaccess click here.
