Presidential Debate Draws Social Crowd

The first presidential debate, which aired across multiple cable and broadcast networks Monday, was a social media behemoth on Facebook and Twitter.

It drew the most uniques of any TV series or special on the night by a factor of almost 100, logging in at 23,974,000. The next highest uniques total was generated by another type of face-off, WWE's Monday Night RAW with 255,000.

Uniques are “unique social media accounts that have authored original content [on those platforms] related to a linear TV episode or engaged with that content."

The total number of posts about the debate and further interactions with those posts (dubbed "engagement") was a whopping 83,016,000 some 200 times the same figure for RAW (426,000)

The baseball game on MLB Network (New York Mets vs. Miami Marlins) was third in uniques on the night (Nielsen puts sports in a separate category) with 1,496,000.

The NFL football game on ESPN (Atlanta Falcons vs. New Orleans Saints) was third in uniques.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.