The list of Twitter's top 10 TV series for 2015 is out, and it's no surprise that Walking Dead and Empire lead the pack in social media mentions. When it came to nonseries specials and sports events, The Super Bowl took top honors, with the first two Republican Presidential debates also making a healthy showing.
Twitter ranks the top shows of the year in order of unique audience — that is, how many unique users viewed one or more of the tweets sent out with respect to each new episode of a series. Using that schematic, The Walking Dead topped the list, with just south of 4 million viewers seeing one of the 424,000 average tweets sent out each time a fresh episode premiered. Veteran reality show The Bachelor came in second, with around 3.6 million viewers checking out fresh tweets about the program. The Bachelor's companion show, The Bachelorette, which turns the tables as one lucky lady sifts through a group of male suitors, placed highly as well, at number 4. HBO's Game Of Thrones, which focuses on a different, scripted type of drama, placed at number 3.
Another point of measure is the average number of tweets per new episode, and on that account, Fox's soapy hip-hop Empire ruled, with a whopping 559,000 tweets per new episode. Empire also placed fifth on the unique audience list, followed by other dramatic offerings American Horror Story: Hotel, Pretty Little Liars, Scandal, Parks and Recreation, and Grey's Anatomy.
When it came to specials, defined as nonseries, nonsports events, the top five consisted of various award shows, with the Grammy Awards, the Academy Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, the Golden Globe Awards and the American Music Awards topping the list, in that order. Also included in the top 10 were several political programs, including President Obama's State Of The Union Address and the first two Republican Presidential debates, no doubt buoyed by the presence of the unpredictable Donald Trump.
The Super Bowl, however, trumped everything else shown on TV this year including Trump himself, with average unique views of the more than 25 million tweets of the event seen by more than 16 million Twitter followers.
