For better or worse, the crew from MTV’s Jersey Shore has returned for their fifth season and fist pumped their way to 702,536 social media mentions on January 5^th, 2012 and 286,290 mentions during the shows’ airing. This crushed all shows on social that premiered new episodes last night. These numbers were arrived at by looking for all mentions of “Jersey Shore” and “#jerseyshore” between 12AM January 5, 2012 to this morning at 9:00AM Atlantic Standard Time.

To be perfectly frank, the numbers surprised me as the show returned the highest number of mentions that I’ve seen since I start following this data in September. To provide some context, I did a quick Google search to see if there were any articles indicating how many viewers tuned in Thursday night. Unfortunately, writing this article at this time there isn’t, however, the Season 4 premier in August 2011 netted an audience of 8.8 million viewers.

If one assumes that the viewership for last night’s season premier was similar it helps to put the 702,536 mentions in context.

I was still a little suspect of the numbers so I wanted to drill down a little further and find out how many “unique sources” were posting about Jersey Shore. This helps to understand how many individual accounts were tweeting about the show. Filtering by “unique source count” returned 348,832 individual accounts tweeting about the show’s premier Thursday night. Dividing the total number of mentions by the total number of unique sources equals an average of about two mentions per account. The numbers are definitely accurate.

Taking a peek at the social demographics of who was talking about Jersey Shore on social Thursday night the figures for age groups and gender are likely what you would expect.

With social numbers like this, there is a wealth of data to be mined. What did people like? What didn’t they like? What were the most discussed portions of the show? Which cast member generates the most conversations? How many conversations mention product placements? The data is in there.

So what do you think of the numbers? What information would you be most interested in pulling out of the platform?