‘Game of Thrones’ hysteria on Social Media

When the sixth series of Game of Thrones –“The Red Woman" landed officially, it was pure hysteria and euphoria all around. The buzz created on the social networking sites generated more than 1.5 million social posts in the last week.

According to the report published by Adweek, from Friday to Sunday, there were more than 829,000 Twitter mentions of HBO, Game of Thrones, HBO Go and HBO Now. People used #GOT 602,000 times in that time-frame while HBO earned 248,000 mentions. During the hour of the show, nearly 200,000 interactions happened on social media, with spikes at the open and close.

Social media analytics company Talkwalker sees this as a golden opportunity for advertising companies. Marissa Cazem, U.S. public relations and communications director at Talkwalker says, "This engagement period is a great time for advertisers to take advantage of this pivotal time to target engaged or focused audiences with targeted ads that relate to the audiences interests. Take this time to offer a special promotion to users, such as a contest to win a free product if viewers can name the first character to be killed off of the show within a given time-frame."

The show was especially popular in New York and California, as each generated more than 66,000 mentions. Users in India generated more than 32,300 Game of Thrones mentions this week—23,000 on Sunday and Monday alone. In firewalled China, people generated more than 1,300 mentions this week on social media.

"Snow" and "Jon Snow" led mentions of any character on social media according to Talkwalker. Mentions of Daenerys Targaryen rose 180.2 percent while Melisandre was a new trending theme.

Apart from Twitter, Spotify, a digital music service also generated a lot of conversation from its Game of Thrones integration, allowing users to determine which character they'd be, based on their playlists. The attempt, named #SpotifyGameOfThrones, garnered 14,800 mentions.