Love & Hip Hop Atlanta Boosts VH Digital Traffic

A major push to expand mobile and social media efforts for the second season Love & Hip Hop Atlanta on VH1 paid off with very strong on-air ratings as well as significant social media and mobile traffic for VH1 Digital, company executives said.

The second season saw a number of expanded digital efforts, including the Check Yourself digital series that drew 1.7 million streams, social hashtag battles and a new Love & Hip Hop ATL Social Leaderboard in partnership with Social Toaster.

The first season became the most social show of the summer of 2012, noted Dan Sacher, VP of digital for VH1 and Logo. So the goal in the second season was to build on that and create not just a one-hour experience [for TV and digital during the live airing] but create a social and mobile seven day a week experience.

As part of that effort, they produced new digital episodes of the Check Yourself, which showed talent reacting to scenes from the weeks episode. Those digital episodes produced 1.7 million streams and helped drive significant social media activity.

Twitter volume per minute ranged from 9,611 for the May 27episode to 20,775 on June 17 and 14,275 on July 1, with a high of 26,939 tweets per minute for the second season premiere on April 22. Those are numbers that you might see for a huge pop cultural live event, said Sam Blake Hofstetter, director of social media for VH1. A good night for many shows is in the 1,200 range.

Unique tweeters also ranged from 206,566 to a high of 640,637 in various episodes and tweets per user were much higher than they typically show. Tweets per unique typically ranged from 3 to 4.5 during each episode. The typical prime time show might get one or two tweets per unique, he adds.

To help drive that activity, the show featured hashtag battles, using Mass Relevance data, and set up a Social Leaderboard.

Users of the Leaderboard collected points for re-tweets, linking pages, recruiting friends and other activities that they could then use to compete for weekly prizes and a grand prize for the season.

Cast members were also extremely active on social media to help boost traffic, Sacher said.

This paid off in ratings. The second season of the show, which wrapped up on July 1, was the No. 1 cable show on Monday nights in its time period and in primetime among adults and women ages 18 to 34, 18 to 49 and 25 to 54, if sports and specials were excluded. The data covers April 22 to June 24 for live plus seven day viewing, VH1 executives reported.

Mobile activity also saw a significant bounce during the shows run. Following the premiere in April, VH1 had 1.8 million mobile visitors, up 49% from a year earlier.

VH1 digital also reported that users were streaming more video on mobile devices, with 820,000 streams in May 2013, up 120% from a year earlier. VH1 executives said that Love & Hip Hop Atlanta drove the lions share of that growth.

LINK:	http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/494364-_Love_Hip_Hop_Atlanta_...
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