Everybody breathe.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve just started watching ABC’s Scandal or have been watching since episode 1, no one can deny Shonda Rhimes’ creativity and talent in creating an infectious television series. Her characters capture our attention and the plot lines keep us begging for more week by week. She’s repeated this in “Grey’s Anatomy”, “Private Practice”, and now “Scandal”.
Perhaps even more impressive is the show’s masterful usage of social media. If you don’t watch the show, I’m willing to bet you’ve gotten 140-character snapshots into the plot due to a friend’s tweet or Facebook status. Yes, this has a purpose! Every Thursday the show comes on, I’m simultaneously glued to my television and my twitter feed. Apparently, so are over 2,000 tweeters per minute when the show is on (according to Hollywood Reporter).
What do those tweets mean for Scandal, ABC, and Shonda’s pockets?
While seemingly the entire twittersphere, including the actual Scandal cast, are talking about the show, our followers and their followers are watching. Their interest grows until they can no longer stand it and eventual search the show for themselves. Slowly, they meander from ABC’s website, to Netflix, to the their television sets on Thursday nights. This all equals advertising dollars for ABC. As they increase their viewership due to an excellent writing and a fervent following, the advertising dollars pile in because more and more brands will want to take advantage of the captive and highly engaged audience.
I predict that the folks at Scandal and ABC will be researching ways to quantify and further monetize all the tweets they gather from their fans. I’d look to this show and others like it to set the tone for a new wave of television-meets-social-media advertising.