It was not the election night coverage but the Saturday Night Live episode featuring Dave Chappelle's take on it that was the top program of last week in Nielsen Social's list of the most tweeted about and Facebook-posted non-sports TV shows. But both were blown away by the numbers in the sports category by the Dallas Cowboys-Pittsburgh Steelers game that saw the see-saw battle go down to the wire in a game described as one of the most exciting ever in the regular season.
The NFL game drew a whopping 18,647,000 interactions, according to Nielsen, which are defined as original posts about a TV show and "engagement" with the content (three hours before through three hours after the broadcast). Facebook had the lion's share of those with 17,692,000 to Twitter's 955,000.
SNL drew 1,715,000 "interactions" and Facebook was again the big winner with 1,376,000 interactions to Twitter's 339,000
Fox's election night coverage did come in at number two among entertainment shows with 1,482,000 interactions, 1,203,000 of them on Facebook and 279,000 on Twitter.
Rounding out the top five entertainment shows were The Walking Dead at 1,330,000 interactions (1,085,000 Facebook/245,000 Twitter); Empire at 813,000 interactions (693,000 Facebook/120,000 Twitter), and CNN's election coverage at 730,000, with an almost even split of Facebook (368,000) and Twitter (362,000).
