•    Social media predicted the winner
•    There’s no ‘hindsight bias’ here
•    Tulisa gains most Twitter followers for the first time in the series

With the eighth series of The X Factor now drawing to a close, we are able to reflect on what we have seen and learnt over the last 10 weeks.  For those that have been following along with our weekly blog posts since the live shows began, our focus has naturally been on social media – and the role this has played both for the contestants, but also for the programme makers.

We have crunched the numbers and analysed the data each week, and we’ve done it manually – investing many, many hours in the process.  We’ve not had access to the qualitative insights a robust social media measurement tool can provide, nor the data and analytics that the X Factor in-house teams do. There are a plethora of tools out there we could have looked at, but for consistency, we elected to remain with readily available figures that aren’t open to interpretation.  The numbers are what they are.  Regardless, the limited data that we have captured has been able to provide an incredible amount of insight, which we hope those of you that have followed along over the weeks have seen. Read More »

Manchester is once again in a state of revolution. At the turn of the 19th century, the city led the Industrial Revolution with a boom in textile manufacturing. Today, Manchester is ushering in the Digital Revolution as a leading media hub, by developing MediaCityUK with like the BBC Future Media & Technology, ITV and SIS and wider across the city with Code Computer Love, McCann, Magnetic North, Siemens. Just as the Industrial Revolution caused a fundamental sociological shift in the way people perceived the world around them, the shift from an analogue to a digital society is changing the communicative structures of the world because people are connected to each other in new and, importantly, more ways. Read More »

· Little Mix still set to win (according to social media)

· Most popular during Saturday¹s show was Amelia Lily

· Average growth of fans during Week 9 performances 16,330

The semi-final of The X Factor went exactly as social media indicated it would; Misha B leaving the show and Marcus, Amelia Lily and girl band Little Mix forging ahead to Wembley this coming weekend. Read More »

As we’re entering the final week, we are keeping an even keener eye on all things X Factor and social media.

The semi final results show was hit by Bieber fever yesterday as Canadian superstar performed.  Whether he sang live or mimed is still the subject of tweebate, but regardless of that he caused a bit of a social media stir.  As was to be expected. Read More »

•    Social media points to a Little Mix victory
•    Contestants grow by average of 12,400 fans during live shows
•    Approximately 80.3 million views on YouTube in eight weeks

With just two more live shows to go, Week 8 (the quarter finals) saw each of the five contestants sing two songs each; a guilty pleasure, and a song by a musical hero.  Aside from 17 year old Janet Devlin forgetting the words during her first song (not her first time), the show experienced less drama.

For the second week in a row (and the third in all), Little Mix topped the list of fastest growing contestants gaining 21,461 fans across Facebook and Twitter during Saturday and Sunday.  The next closest was Amelia Lily at 18,517 and then Marcus 16,502.  For yet another week in a row, both Misha B and Janet received less than 10,000 new fans – which goes to strengthen the question we raised in Week 6: was the audience beginning to lose interest in those two contestants?

Read More »

•    Have viewing figures dropped again this week?
•    Can Little Mix be the first band to win?
•    Is it a Marcus, Amelia Lily and Little Mix final?

Back in Week 3, I wrote about how Craig may be what I called a ‘performance based’ contestant, in that the strength of his performances rather than fan loyalty determined whether he was safe to continue through the shows.  For Week 7, we saw Craig criticised rather heavily for having the wrong song choice.  It seems that, along with being the first to sing (therefore not being fresh in people’s minds by the time the voting opens) was a deadly combination for the young Liverpudlian singer as he was booted off the show in the series first Deadlock situation. Read More »

•    Is Janet Delvin starting to bore viewers?
•    Are people turning off Misha B?
•    Can Amelia Lily sweep in and steal the crown?

Did Gary Barlow reflect or influence the opinion of the viewing public this week when he commented that he was starting to find Janet Devlin boring?  More than likely, it would be a mixture of the two.  Either way, it didn’t carry enough weight to impact on the phone voting in Week 6, as Janet was safe for another week. Read More »

Week 5 saw in the halfway mark for ITV’s The X Factor with Dance Classics theme for television reality show, which teased in the most eventful period to date. In more attempts to boost viewing figures, a dinner ‘meeting’ at Gary Barlow’s house with judges, presenters and goodness knows who else culminated in a double eviction on Sunday’s show (which attracted 14.2 million viewers on Sunday, its biggest average results show audience so far this series according to Media Week).

During the week, with the exit of Frankie and now with a contestant who left in Week 1 coming back into the show, Week 6 this weekend will make for an interesting one. Read More »

Back in the summer there was a lot of interest in the move of reporter Laura Kuenssberg as she changed jobs from chief political correspondent for the BBC to the business editor of ITV. In the process the BBC lost 60000 Twitter followers to ITV. A win for the commercial broadcaster.

It sparked a big debate about who owns Twitter followers? Is it the journalist or the employer on whose time these accounts are built up. In the case of Kuenssberg it seemed the journalist, but a judge in the US has refused to dismiss a case where mobile phone news site PhoneDog is arguing that a former reporter had no right to leave with 17,000 followers that it valued at $2.50 a follower. Read More »

At around 1:15pm yesterday, rumours began circulating that X Factor contestant Frankie Cocozza had been kicked off the popular ITV show. Alas poor Frankie his rock n roll antics are no more.

In light of this news, many fans took to social networking sites to find out more information and Keynote Systems, the web and mobile cloud monitoring, found that Twitter’s site performance struggled hugely following this announcement. Read More »