All of the talk after SyFy’s Sharknado was that the ratings didn’t match the social media hype. Twitter was declared shark bait. The ratings for Syfy’s encore showing of Sharknado proved otherwise.
YouTube
After a middling 1.4 million viewers turned into the Sharknado premiere, many people were quick to say that the movie was a failure. While the ratings weren’t terrible, they also weren’t great. The numbers certainly didn’t live up to the astounding 5000 tweets per minute. It was the moment for which real journalists and advertisers had been waiting.
Multiple articles were written about how Twitter buzz doesn’t actually relate to viewers or sales, and that social media is a bust. What most people failed to recognize, however, is that a Sharknado, both the movie and the weather pattern, is a very unique event. It’s one of the rare times when a product is entertaining enough to talk about even if you had no plans to use it. I’m not going to make a dozen twitter jokes about Cheerios or The Avengers out of the blue, but I could riff on something called Sharknado all day without ever knowing it was a real movie.
In the end, the Twitter buzz did pay off. The ratings for the encore showing of Sharknado averaged 1.9 million. I’m not a student of TV movie ratings, but a 38% increase in viewers for a rerun seems like a great white improvement. The Twitter hype may not have resulted in real-time excellence, but the lasting effects are certainly apparent.
The reward for your hard work tweeting up a storm is an all day SyFy Sharkathon. Sharknado will air at 9pm on July 27th as part of the shark movie marathon that runs from 9AM-5AM. Other sharktastic classics will be Sharktopus, Two-Headed Shark Attack and Swamp Shark.