Monday night saw one of the best TV ratings results in Australian history with the finale of The Voice.
At national peak, the audience reached over 4 million, and Twitter was
in a frenzy. Over the last 5 days, there have been around 100, 000
mentions of the show in social media- so could this information have
predicted who won The Voice?
The final four who battled
it out were Sarah De Bono, Rachael Leahcar, Darren Percival and Karise
Eden. Looking at volume of mentions broken down by each of the 4
finalists, it shows that Sarah De Bono (Joel Madden’s charge) was
getting the most attention and was generating the most conversation in
social media, especially towards the finale. Sarah, however, came last
out of the 4.
Also worth noting is that winner Karise didn’t
really garner many mentions compared to the others until the lead up to
the finale.
Another thing to take into consideration is that everyone
was watching the finale and tweeting at the same time, so may not have
included Karise’s name in their tweets- for example, “Wow, that voice is
amazing. Congratulations #TheVoiceAU”.
Looking at the sentiment of the discussions, most mentions are neutral or positive for both Karise and Sarah.
So
why did Sarah generate so much buzz, yet come 4th? Volume and buzz
around brands are often heralded as a measure of success, however The Voice
clearly shows that chatter doesn’t always equate to sales or, in this
case, votes. Sure, people were talking about Sarah but they were not
the kind of people to actually go to the effort of voting for her.
Joel Madden (Sarah De Bono’s coach) has the largest twitter following by far out of the four The Voice coaches.
Throughout the competition, Joel would tweet about Sarah’s
performances, and his global following would retweet and amplify that
message, causing a huge volume of mentions for Sarah. So while the
volume of mentions might have been high, it wasn’t necessarily an
engaged audience that was causing this buzz.
This is clearly a
case of influence vs. popularity - Joel is a popular twitter personality
with almost 780, 000 followers. His followers will listen and amplify
his messages, however Joel’s tweets weren’t able to influence those
followers to take the next step and vote for Sarah.
Volume of
mentions for a person, brand or product is not always an accurate
measure of its success in market. It is important that we, as an
industry, can clearly see the differences between popularity and
influence. In social media, we can’t just go after getting the biggest
following, but rather we should aim to have a highly engaged, interested
and active audience.
Madeline Arnold
Social Executive
Mindshare