Jimmy Kimmel and Tracy Morgan boost Emmy social media traffic

Sunday night’s broadcast of the 64th Primetime Emmy Awards on ABC generated an estimated 1 million tweets, according to Bluefin Labs, which measures social media traffic.

Facebook friends contributed another 24,000 comments about the Emmy Awards, which were hosted by ABC’s late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. Traffic levels represented a 148% increase in social media chatter over the previous year, when the gala honoring the best of television generated 427,000 comments, Bluefin Labs said Monday.

However, the 54th Annual Grammy Awards earlier this year easily maintained its record of most-talked-about awards show, with 13 million comments. The 2012 MTV Video Music Awards remains a close second with 12.8 million comments.

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Bluefin Labs determined that 60% of Emmy commenters were women. Viewer sentiment was mostly neutral (69%). However, 21% of the comments were positive and 10% were negative.

The research firm also found a dramatic spike in traffic at about 9:15 p.m. Eastern time when Kimmel encouraged audience members to tweet: “OMG, Tracy Morgan just passed out on stage at the Emmys,” after staging a fake fainting routine by the “30 Rock” actor. Traffic surged to nearly 17,000 tweets per minute. (Overall, there were 74,000 tweets about Morgan.)

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Two other social media highlights were Aaron Paul’s win for supporting actor in a drama, “Breaking Bad,” as well as Damian Lewis’ win for actor in a drama in “Homeland.”

More than 13.2 million viewers tuned in to ABC’s broadcast, a jump of 6% over the previous year, according to Nielsen ratings data provided by the network. Last year, 12.4 million people watched when the event was broadcast by Fox.

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