‘Game of Thrones’ Teaser Campaign Marks Buzziest Week Since Snow’s ‘Return’

“Game of Thrones” gained the attention of its social audience through its teaser campaign this week, which helped the series climb back onto the Cable/Streaming leaderboard.

The Twitter-focused campaign, which encouraged users to tweet with special hashtags for a direct reply including teaser videos, was able to drive cross-channel engagement throughout the week, with YouTube and Facebook generating millions of views. All of the cross-channel activity helped make this “GOT’s” most engaging week since the infamous ‘Jon Snow’ teasers, with a DAR-TV of 2.9 million in addition to more than 2 million Facebook video views.

This week’s “House of” teasers generated more than 2.4 million YouTube views, with the House of Stark preview attracting the most interest on YouTube — nearly 300k more YouTube views than the other two clips. In contrast, it was the House of Targaryen clip that was the most viewed on Facebook after racking up 1.2 million views in less than a day.

Provided by ListenFirst Media, DAR – TV measures what entertainment content is resonating most across Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube and Wikipedia combined. For more on the methodology behind DAR – TV, scroll to the bottom of the article.

Jason Klein is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of ListenFirst Media, a data and analytics company providing insights for brands. ListenFirst aggregates data streams from a wide range of digital, social, and traditional marketing sources to help brands optimize business performance.

Methodology:

ListenFirst Digital Audience Ratings (DAR) for Television are a raw aggregate of daily engagements based on owned, earned and organic consumer behavior on Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, Wikipedia and YouTube. These engagements encompass metrics pertaining to audience growth, page/profile views, page-level and post-level interactions, hashtag volume and Wikipedia page views for all television program pages (which provides a proxy for organic search volume).

Organic conversation volume is calculated based on the use of official hashtags, as well as those hashtags submitted directly from programmers and distributors. Only hashtags where conversation can be isolated to a specific television program are included in the rating.

The Variety weekly leaderboards for television represent the 7-day (Monday – Sunday) sum total of DAR – TV for all episodic programming, in and out of season, from the most popular programmers (Broadcast, Cable, & Streaming Services). Sports, live events, short-form content and other non-episodic programming are excluded from this ranking cohort but available to be rated directly by ListenFirst Media.

The Broadcast and Cable/Streaming Originals leaderboards each surface the respective top ten primetime programs. The Late Night leaderboard surfaces the top five late night / variety genre programs, from across the programming universe. Streaming Originals are considered primetime cable programming.

The Trending Leaderboard surfaces the three programs that tracked the largest relative growth in DAR – TV (from the previous 7-day measurement period), and are also in the top 25% based on absolute DAR – TV, from across the programming universe.

ListenFirst monitors the official digital account owned by the program on each aforementioned platform (except for Wikipedia, where the title-specific profile is considered official). Only the U.S. version of a program’s digital presence is monitored; for platforms that support regional profiles like Facebook, the “Global” profile is considered the U.S. profile. Only profiles that can be attributed to the specific program contribute to the rating (i.e. engagements that happen on the profile facebook.com/LouieFX are tracked, while engagements that happen on facebook.com/FX are not). For YouTube, in addition to any program-specific presence, content related to the program in question that originated on the parent company’s official YouTube channel is considered.

Note: Twitter data has been removed from Digital Audience Ratings (DAR) for Television as of 10/7/2014.

For other questions pertaining to methodology, contact ListenFirst Media.

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