Launching nearly a year prior to “The Glee Project's" on-air premiere, @TheGleeProject represents a unique long lead approach to television marketing on social platforms platform. Starting out with live tweets during Season 2 episodes of GLEE on FOX, @TheGleeProject established itself as the “gleeky best friend" in over 162K fans' Twitter streams. Followers received information about the show's casting process, live tweets from the open casting calls and interacted with our official tweeter. They were also able to follow a live Twitter stream during Oxygen's two GLEE marathons and participate in a GLEE trivia contest. Closer to premiere, fans could follow The Glee Project's 12 contenders through Twitter lists and “Follow Fridays." To augment the Twitter experience, Oxygen provided the show's contenders with training to help them set up their own Twitter accounts and engage fans. On premiere night on 6/12/11, fans were able to follow live tweets from our NYC viewing party with the contenders. Every week thereafter, fans were able to follow live tweets being syndicated out from OxygenLive.com, Oxygen's award-winning real-time second screen viewing platform, during the show on both @TheGleeProject and the account of the contender who hosted each week's chat. Live tweeting activity during the finale helped push all four finalists' names into the Worldwide trending topics list! Throughout the series, fans were engaged with fun conversation igniting hashtags (i.e. #LastChancePerformanceSongIdPick, #MyBiggestDream, #ReasonsToLoveTheGleeProject) and opportunities to earn re-tweets, or to be recognized in a Follow Friday tweet. Even though there have been no new original episodes released since the season ended in August, fan engagement on Twitter keeps going strong. This fall, fans were able to follow live tweets from “The Glee Project" open casting calls in NYC, Chicago and Nashville, join live chats with winning contender Damian McGinty and Cameron Mitchell, enter trivia tweetstakes to win prizes during our Black Friday Season 1 marathon, and participate in Twitter parties during airings of GLEE on FOX every Tuesday night. Results: “The Glee Project" Twitter account became Oxygen’s most followed account ever. Experiencing spectacular growth throughout the show’s first season, @TheGleeProject 461% from roughly 17K followers when the show premiered on 06/12/11 to nearly 98K followers after the show’s finale on 8/21/11, and has grown an additional 64% in the three months post-finale to the current count of over 161K followers. This growth has helped boost additional traffic to Oxygen.com. During this period, Twitter was the #3 external referring domain of all Oxygen.com traffic behind Google and Facebook during “The Glee Project". Inbound traffic from OxygenLive syndicated tweets accounted for approximately 50% of unique daily visitors to OxygenLive.com. (source: Omniture SiteCatalyst, 06/12/11—8/21/11) Each episode of the series ranked in the top five most mentioned programs amongst all cable television programs on Sunday nights, with the season finale coming in at the #1 most mentioned show amongst all Cable and Broadcast programs, and over 700K social mentions being recorded throughout the series. (source: Trendrr) Furthermore, Twitter activity drove high levels of awareness that support on-air ratings growth. Since its premiere on 6/12/11, the series has posted impressive triple-digit growth with +172% in total viewers and +167% among W18-49. Source: Nielsen Media Research. “The Glee Project" Twitter account has even become a revenue generating asset through the inclusion of sponsored tweets in one of the program’s marquis sponsorship packages.
