From Lorde winning back to back awards, to the animated revival of Michael Jackson, to Jennifer Lopez’s big moment, the 2014 Billboard Music Awards had its fair share of big moments. Which were the biggest drivers of online conversation?
While Michael Jackson’s pyrotechnics-filled hologram performance was certainly a headline worthy technical achievement, the top moment of the night belonged to Katy Perry, who appended the hashtag #MakeItLikeYourBirthday to her video performance of “Birthday,” inciting her fan army in the process. The performance immediately followed Lorde winning Top New Artist, and at its high point reached 57,000 tweets in a single minute.
Perry likely benefitted because she directly followed Lorde, the other crowd favorite of the evening. Her performance of “Tennis Court,” which began roughly at 9:57 EST was the second most conversation-driving moment of the evening which peaked at 39,000 tweets in a single minute.
The BBMA’s young, social media savvy consumers that drove the majority of the online conversation about the awards. 87% of the authors sending Tweets were under the age of 25, and 68% of these authors were female.
This explains why a relatively new artist to most, 5 Seconds of Summer, was the most mentioned Twitter account of the evening. The band’s official account, @5SOS, was mentioned a whopping 451,000 times. Along with the personal accounts of its four members (Luke Hemmings, Ashton Irwin, Michael Clifford and Calum Hood), 5 Seconds of Summer as a whole received more mentions than every single performer and talent at the awards show combined. Outside of 5 Seconds of Summer, Iggy Azalea, Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber and Kendall Jenner were among the top accounts mentioned.
The evening’s official hashtag, #bbmas, was used more than 722,000 times. Impressively, 5 Seconds of Summer’s own fan-made hashtag, #5sosbbmas, received the second-most mentions of the evening, over #billboards2014 and #bbma.
Overall, the 2014 Billboard Music Awards generated more than 5.45 million tweets throughout the day, which includes online activity generated around the Samsung Red Carpet LIVE online broadcast hosted by Lance Bass and Jordin Sparks. Those tweets were sent by 1.02 million unique authors, that were viewed 248 million times to reach 10.18 million people.
The data, provided from Twitter directly, was compiled through Nielsen Social Guide. Nielsen Social captures relevant Tweets from three hours before, during and three hours after an episode’s initial broadcast, local time. Unique Audience measures the audience of relevant Tweets ascribed to an episode from when the Tweets are sent until the end of the broadcast day at 5am.