Last year, we saw Masterchef dominate Twitter conversations. It was ironic then that last night Twitter streams were dominated by Hey Hey It’s Saturday tweets (#heyhey)… while Celebrity Masterchef launched. #heyhey reached number one spot on Twitter trending topics worldwide.

But what was of interest to me, wasn’t the volume of tweets, it was who they were coming from. Before the show went to air, Daryl and his crew put out the call for Twitter involvement and interaction. This continued throughout the show.

While there’s no doubt that this was extremely annoying for twaters (Twitter haters),  I suspected that it would bring non-committed Twitter users out of the woodwork. The combination of a low-involvement variety show, an existing history and excitement of a return episode and the prompting to converse via this medium meant that it was easy for those non-committed users to re-engage. So I did some research this morning.

PROJECT ‘KING DARYL’

Question:Were the people discussing Hey Hey It’s Saturday low-involvement Twitter users who were coaxed out by the program?

Process: Compare the number of followers from those discussing #heyhey and the average active Twitter user. Apparently, the average Twitter user has 126 followers but this includes inactive users – I need active users to compare like for like.

- Using Dialogix, take 100 random tweets tagged #heyhey while the show was on air. Tweets must be original. No RT’s or @ replies, corporate or organisational accounts, spam or misconstrued hashtag discussion were included.

- Using the Twitter public timeline, collect 100 random tweets from . Again, tweets must be original. No RT’s or @ replies, corporate or organisational accounts, spam or languages other than English were included.

- Average the number of followers from each group. Compare.

Results: Those tweeting #heyhey during the telecast had, on average, 100 less followers than the average active Twitter user. Twitter users tweeting about Hey Hey It’s Saturday had an average of 154 followers. In comparison, the average active Twitter user has 255 followers.

Conclusion: Hey Hey It’s Saturday encouraged a mass audience (3.95m people) to engage with the show and each other via an organised hashtag on Twitter. The integration of the Twitter dialogue with the show content gave low involvement Twitter users a reason to participate and drove trending for program.

For social media nerds, it was an exciting night. I’ve always had the opinion that traditional media is not dead, it just learns how to play nice with the new kids. And it works the other way. The new kids, such as Twitter, will reach mass acceptance and participation much quicker and easily if they are seen as valuable team members by traditional media.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this. What elements of the telecast were most successful for initiating Twitter discussion? What was it about this particular show that brought low involvement Twitter users out from the shadows? Are there any other television programs which could be better engaging their audience via Twitter?

DISCLAIMER: I am not a researcher. I am fully aware these stats could be more reliable if the sample size was much larger, random tweets were taken from Australia only and at the same time as #heyhey and if  I paid someone qualified to do it.

ADMISSION: Yesterday I tweeted “Hey Hey was funny because it was on a Saturday night when everyone was drunk. Same as Funniest Home Videos. Won’t work on Wednesday.” Sorry Daryl. I was wrong.

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