I read a great post this morning on LostRemote.com about the MTV Video Awards, and MTV’s Twitter Tracker. Interesting to see how MTV actually mapped the seating chart inside the theater so that fans could follow each artist’s tweets before, during and after the show. I found this strategy particularly interesting in light of TicketMaster’s recent partnership with Facebook, which allows fans to see where their friends are sitting.

As I spent time playing around with MTV’s TwitterTracker tool, I noticed Beyonce leading the way in terms of social buzz during the event and even 12 hours after:

Interestingly, while Beyonce had the most buzz on Twitter Tracker up through this morning, I just checked again, and Gaga has closed the gap in terms of social buzz over the past few hours. (Could be due to traditional media’s post event coverage of the show. Apparently Gaga was fun to watch).

Anyway, thinking about social media ratings (for TV shows) got me wondering if the shows with largest TV audiences (i.e. Nielsen ratings) also have the largest social audiences or vice versa. Turns out they don’t. At least not consistently.

The following chart shows TV ratings and social rankings for TV shows during the week ending Aug 21, 2011.

There are some similarities between Broadcast TV, Cable TV and Social Media audiences. Clearly, sports are hugely popular on all three. But there are clear differences in the top 10 lists of broadcast TV, cable TV and social media TV. In fact, the only broadcast property that even registered in the social media Top 10 last week is NFL football.

With Jersey Shore, MTV has a clear winner in both TV and social ratings. Clearly MTV, VH1 and Oxygen have some shows that are popular on the social media front. I wonder if these networks have figured out the keys to building social audiences, or if they’re simply benefiting from the demographic profile of their TV viewers. Shows that skew young or cater to music fans tend to have social audiences.

I’d guess the answer is a bit of both. Because they know their audiences are heavily social, MTV and VH1 and others are investing a lot (and learning a lot) about how to engage viewers both online and on TV. It will be interesting to see the Social Guide 100 rankings during the NFL regular season. I’m guessing we’ll see NFL football dominate the social media rankings, even outdoing Jersey Shore, regardless of the network carrying the games.

Sports, Music, Movies and games are clearly the most social of all content. If you’re interested in learning more about how to leverage sports and entertainment content to build digital business, and if you’d like to meet the men and women who handle digital strategy for the top sports and entertainment properties, then you should plan to join us at our upcoming Digital Fan Marketing Summit, Oct 11, in San Francisco.