3 Lessons From Social Media Buzz Around The Oscars

Kira M. Newman Feb 27, 2012 Tweet

Many of us spent last night with our eyes glued to the TV and our fingers glued to our keyboards during the Oscars. Meanwhile, social analytics platform AddThis was humming away monitoring our social media activity. Below are some insights (as interpreted by me) from their data.

Everyone loves Pinterest. AddThis saw Oscar-related sharing on over 200 services, with the most popular being Twitter, then Pinterest, then Facebook.

“Pinterest sharing took off during the red carpet show and continued through the show with people sharing pictures of the fashion from the red carpet…Pinterest is a very visual medium which makes it a natural for a fashion theme,” says AddThis director of product Greg Cypes.

It’s an amazing accomplishment for Pinterest to even be on their radar, not to mention scoring #2. Congrats to Pinterest.

The power of the grassroots. Hugo and The Artist, the two films with the highest social media buzz before the Oscars (see chart below), took home a bunch of golden statues – but not so much for the less-discussed movies:

“Warhorse, which was an critically acclaimed movie, had poor marketing and missed out on any awards,” says Cypes.

This is the case even though Oscars are awarded by elite Academy members, demonstrating – like several recent PR fiascos in the tech industry – the power of the grassroots.

Fickleness, thy name is Internet. AddThis also notes that most sharing and searching was related to new actors: “Demian Bichir was not even on the radar until the nominations were announced.” The Internet is hungry for new trends, but digital memes and popularity come and go; no one seems to have cracked the code to virality yet.