Netflix has successfully used social media to create more buzz than just about any other show out there right now for House of Cards.
We’ve all been there — a Sunday afternoon marathoning Lost or some other show that’s been aired for years, yet we never got around to watching it.
Now think about when a new show premieres. Most of us whip out our phones and share the excitement along with thousands of other viewers watching on social media. Live events tend to generate a mass amount of buzz because we’re all watching together at the same time.
Netflix has experimented with a new way to watch television by releasing all episodes from season one of the original series House of Cards. By comparing similar shows on various networks, our friends at Mashwork have come up with an interesting conclusion on how this affects social buzz, shown in the infographic below.
In order to do so, the team analyzed tweets from shows like The Walking Dead, which premiered in 2010. Twitter has grown from 15 million users in 2009, to 200 million as of December 2012, as Statista points out, and The Walking Dead still had the most popular premiere out of all the shows.
House of Cards had the highest percentage of overall buzz occur during the first week following the premiere. That buzz also decreased at a faster rate than any of the other shows.
The funny part is that they make a big deal in the movie about social media based websites reporting news growing fast and making a huge impact on politics and how a lot of old industry mediums are a dying breed.
I am surprised netflix hasn’t gone more social itself. Youtube has video comments, friends etc.
They could easily allow you to follow other netflix users and see what they watched and use that to find movies you like by people with similar taste. They could also allow time stamp commenting and that very feedback loop would be powerful. If I was creating a series I would want to know what people say scene by scene, and if they start catering towards both the movie itself and the viewers as well, the feedback gained on both sides could be very constructive.
They could even take aim at Google/youtube someday and have a section of the site for video uploads and amateur movie uploads/documentaries/etc.