‘Scandal’ tops the new Nielsen Twitter TV ratings

The third-season premiere of ABC’s Washington-centric political thriller “Scandal” reverberated beyond the Beltway, ranking at the top of the new Nielsen Twitter TV ratings.

Thursday night’s episode, in which Washington fixer Olivia Pope’s name was leaked as the president’s mistress, attracted 10.5 million television viewers. “Scandal” also made some noise on the social media platform Twitter, with nearly 713,000 tweets about the episode reaching a Twitter audience of 3.7 million, Nielsen reported.

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The sudsy drama proved even more social than the MTV documentary “Miley: The Movement,” which followed Miley Cyrus’ efforts to shed her persona as a Disney Channel star and focus on music. That program generated some 142,000 tweets that reached a Twitter audience of just under 3.2 million, Nielsen reported. But overall, Cyrus was a social phenomenon, also sparking conversation with her appearance on “Saturday Night Live.”

The new Nielsen Twitter TV measurement ranks shows according to the unique audience of Twitter users who have been exposed to at least one tweet about a program. It also identifies the number of tweets associated with a particular episode.

The rankings for the week of Sept. 30-Oct. 6 are as follows:

Rank Program Date Network Unique Audience (000) Tweets (000)

1 Scandal 10/3/13 ABC 3,655.2 712.9
2 Miley: The Movement 10/2/13 MTV 3,185.2 142.4
3 Saturday Night Live 10/5/13 NBC 3,146.5 175.8
4 The Voice 10/1/13 NBC 2,619.8 106.6
5 The Voice 9/30/13 NBC 2,558.7 135.0
6 The Vampire Diaries 10/3/13 CW 2,488.4 278.0
7 Glee 10/3/13 FOX 2,270.1 196.0
8 Dancing With the Stars 9/30/13 ABC 2,092.9 59.8
9 The X Factor 10/2/13 FOX 2,039.0 255.2
10 The X Factor 10/3/13 FOX 1,802.5 188.8

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Nielsen measuring audience of TV-related tweets during programs