A 90 minute campy Syfy channel movie that climaxes with a duel between a man with a chainsaw and a flying shark was a social media hit on a quiet summer night. There were more than 604,000 tweets about the irresistible Sharknado from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. on Thursday, according to social media analytics firm Fizziology.
The Syfy film, which starred Tara Reid, Ian Ziering and Cassie Scerbo, premiered at 9 p.m. … HBO’s widely discussed Game of Thrones ‘Red Wedding’ episode drew 241,000 tweets … Twitter itself also contextualized the outsized response to the sharks-meet-tornados B-movie … The microblogging platform’s official data account posted a chart showing a peak of more than 5,000 tweets a minute were referencing Sharknado at 10:58 p.m.
Also, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Joshua Green reports on Sharknado’s amazing political power: The “sudden breakout of bipartisanship was entirely unexpected. The catalyst was … the cultural phenomenon of Sharknado, the Syfy channel’s terrible/awesome B-movie about a gigantic tornado that sucks up millions of ferocious sharks from the Pacific Ocean and rains them down on a terrified Los Angeles.
… Even before the movie started, … it was generating unusual Twitter buzz. That traffic exploded as the Sharknado got going, oddly finding its most passionate audience among political types of both parties, who had a weird kind of moment as the movie progressed. Call it ‘B-movie bipartisanship.’
… I asked a Republican ad buyer-Will Feltus, the senior vice president of research at National Media-if he had any demographic information on Syfy’s audience. … [The] audience [for the Syfy basic-cable channel] is almost perfectly bipartisan.
