It looks like last week's Country Music Association Awards saw a jump in viewership on several levels, versus the 2012 edition.
The show, hosted once again by its popular Carrie Underwood/Brad Paisley combo on ABC, averaged 16.6 million viewers throughout, a 3 million viewer rise from last year. Of course, advertisers don't just consider television sets when considering the "popularity" of an event. Therefore, it's more relevant that the ceremony also saw marked improvements in related social media activity as well.
Perhaps the most interesting statistic to take from Twitter analytics is that women dominated the platform when discussing the CMA's. It's been complained recently that country music gives an unfair amount of attention to male performers, despite the successes of Underwood and Taylor Swift. Women clearly seem to be the most interested in the genre however. Women aged 25-34 (about as key a demographic as you can find) topped the Twitter use, and women rounded out the rest of the Top 5.
The location of the Twitter usage was fairly predictable, with Texas and Georgia respectively topping the list of states tweeting about the event. However, New Jersey came in third, interrupting the line from Georgia to Florida (we'll let ourselves out). Tennessee, home to host city Nashville, only got to no. 5.
Somewhat interesting considering the number of women tweeting, the most-tweeted topics were dominated by men. No. 1, George Strait's winning Entertainer of The Year, is understandable. No. 2 and no. 3 were Strait and Alan Jackson performing George Jones' "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and Luke Bryan's performance of "That's My Kind of Night," respectively.
Facebook saw 8.8 million CMA-related interactions from 4 million users.
