•    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 »

As The X Factor entered its fourth week of live shows (the Halloween theme), it was the week for surprises.  We also continued to see a levelling out of the final 10 contestants social media profiles, with each contestant gaining an average of 10,000 fans across Twitter and Facebook during week 4, compared to an average of 12,500 in week 3.

Some of the surprises mentioned include as Kelly being too ill to fly back from LA and former X Factor winner Alexandra Bourke stepping in as guest judge.  The resignation of one of The Risk (Ashley J. Baptiste), and former Nu Vibe contestant coming back onto live shows to join the boy band (Ashford Campbell).  Girl band Rhythmix having to change their name due to a trademark with a charity of the same name, they are now called Little Mix.  Last but not least, Week 4 saw two of the popular contestants from The Girls category in the bottom two (Misha B and Sophie Habibis), with Sophie Habibis sent packing. Read More »

There’s been a lot of talk in the last few weeks about The X Factor’s viewing figures this year compared to last.

Gary Barlow has talked both on The Xtra Factor and in the media about wanting to continue to improve week on week, and is quoted as saying that Simon Cowell has set a target of 10% increase each week. Read More »

As ITV’s X Factor entered the first week with the public vote determining the fate of the contestants, The Groups lost its second act, Nu Vibe.  What impact did the social media numbers across contestants, judges and The X Factor have?

In terms of number of fans on Facebook, although they grew over the week by a significant number across the acts (Janet’s by over 100,000) the top four didn’t change place: Janet, Frankie, Misha B and The Risk.  If you were to make an early prediction based on last week and looking solely at the figures below, Janet looks like a possible winner.  Her social media channels have grown exponentially last week, particularly on Facebook which jumped up by 153,000 Likes.  Janet was always an early leader, before the live shows even started and unfortunately last week we learnt that her grandfather had passed away, which undoubtedly had an impact on her social media profile. Read More »

Each week we’ll be bringing you an overview of ITV’s The X Factor and what is happening in social media around the show, which has massively benefited by the surge in interactivity that two screen viewing has brought. We’re looking at the 16 finalists, judges and The X Factor’s official social media channels; Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

As the intro is being played at the start of the Saturday show, we took screen-captures of each profile (approximately 40 in total), which we did again as the credits rolled.  This was done again at the start and finish of the Live Results show on Sunday, and it will be done the same way for the rest of the live shows in the following 11 or so weeks. We have also created this infographic, which we hope you like at the foot of the post. Read More »