This year’s Shark Week may be the biggest and craziest yet – with plenty of celebrity hosts including Shaq, Mike Tyson, and Rob Gronkowski. Although Mike Tysons’s comeback against Roy Jones Jr was postponed, fans can still see Tyson in action fighting a shark. The shark fight became the number one topic of discussion yesterday, according to international social media analytics firm Talkwalker.
Mike Tyson was mentioned 1,300 times yesterday, but the event itself – dubbed “Rumble” – with the shark was mentioned 92,400 times. So combined, the Tyson event was mentioned 93,700 times, almost exclusively between 4 and 8 p.m. and representing approximately 60 percent of the total conversation, Talkwalker reports.
Overall, there were nearly 140,000 mentions of Shark Week over a 24-hour period, generating 188,000 engagements, including 100,000 mentions between 4 and 8 p.m. yesterday (Sunday).
For comparative perspective, in the NBA yesterday, Portland played the Philadelphia 76ers at around that same time. That game generated just 19,300 mentions and 36,000 engagements.
The most engaging tweet came from Mike Tyson, garnering 1.9 million views, and more than 26,000 engagements
Demographics show that the Shark Week audience (or at least the engaged online audience) is mostly male: with 86 percent of the social audience, Talkwalker reports. In addition, 50 percent the total social audience tweeting about Shark Week (male and female) are between the ages of 25-34. They are employed parents, holding job titles like executive manager, analyst, scientist or engineer. Their interests range from art to parenting, reading and literature, sports and of course animals. Also, 7.3 percent of the people tweeting about Shark Week mention sports as an interest, compared to only 6.9 percent who list animals as an interest.
Shark Week specific commercials, such as this event specific ad from Geico demonstrate that the event is a big endeavor and worthy of special creative.
The event was also a big win for non-profit group OCEANA who had some of the most mentions for a brand. Other top brands were of course the Discovery Channel, Twitter, and Fortnite.
For some though the brand feeding frenzy has made them yearn for a simpler time when Shark Week was all about the sharks.
Talkwalker is a social listening and analytics company that empowers over 2,000 brands and agencies to optimize the impact of their communication efforts. We provide companies with an easy-to-use platform to protect, measure, and promote their brands worldwide, across all communication channels.
Talkwalker’s state-of-the-art social media analytics platform uses AI-powered technology to monitor and analyze online conversations in real-time across social networks, news websites, blogs and forums in 187 languages. Talkwalker has offices in New York, Luxembourg, San Francisco, Frankfurt, and Singapore. It is also the home of Talkwalker Alerts, a free alerting service used by over 500,000 communications and marketing professionals worldwide.
