Most-Tweeted TV in 2014: ‘Walking Dead,’ Oscars, Grammys and Super Bowl

The Walking Dead dominated Twitter in 2014, ranking supreme as the most-tweeted television series for the year.

AMC’s zombie drama attracted an average 576,000 tweets per episode, according to a Nielsen report on Twitter released Monday, and 4.93 million people read at least one post before 5 a.m. the next day. Nielsen counted tweets about the show posted within three-hour windows before and after the show was broadcast.

In its report, Nielsen ranked the top television series, special events and sportscasts across Twitter. The metrics group also revealed the minute in each category that was tweeted about most.

The TV series with the second-highest number of tweets was ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars, with 489,000 posts per episode, more than twice The Bachelor‘s 215,000-post average. But the ABC reality show reached a slightly larger Twitter audience than Liars, with 3.84 million readers, versus Liars’ 3.80 million readers.

ABC’s Scandal stood out with an average 391,000 tweets, but its audience reach of 2.57 million fell below FX’s American Horror Story: Freak Show (3.60 million), HBO’s Game of Thrones (3.50 million) and MTV’s Teen Wolf (2.63 million).

ABC’s The Bachelorette, NBC’s The Voice and ABC’s Dancing With the Stars rounded off the Top 10.

Read more ‘Walking Dead’ Prequel Casts Female Lead

The Voice earned the most-tweeted minute for a television series at 8:59 p.m. ET on May 13, when the show’s judges announced which contestants would advance to the finale the following week.

For special event television shows, ABC’s Oscars telecast wrestled with CBS’ Grammy Awards for top billing. Twitter had 13.77 million posts about the Grammys, compared to the Oscars’ 11.16 million, but the film awards captured an audience of 13.92 million, compared with the music awards’ 12.82 million.

The Oscars took the year’s most-tweeted-about minute for a special event: the minute following Ellen DeGeneres’ star-studded group selfie. The publicity stunt garnered 203,000 tweets at 10:07 p.m. ET on March 2.

The most popular sportscast for the year on Twitter was Fox’s Super Bowl XLVIII, with 25.32 million tweets and an audience of 15.31 million.

The game also scored the most-tweeted sports event minute of 2014: 301,000 tweets at 10 p.m. ET on Feb. 2, when the Seattle Seahawks wrapped up a 43-8 victory over the Denver Broncos.

The soccer World Cup dominated Twitter for the year’s sports events, taking six of the Top 10 spots. The most-tweeted game was the July 1 match between the U.S. and Belgium, which pushed the U.S. out of the tournament and drew 4.69 million tweets and an audience of 12.39 million.

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