Five kings may have tried to rule Westeros, but in the land of social media, there is only one.

Game of Thrones, First of Its Name, premiered its fourth season Sunday, April 6^th to some 6.6 million people. To put it in perspective that’s 1.5 million more viewers than its third season premiere and exactly triple its debut in 2011.

These numbers seem huge until you compare them with HBO-legacy The Sopranos who bowed out with nearly 12 million viewers, and AMC’s Breaking Bad who finished with a respectable 10 million. Yet for a show whose ratings haven’t broken any records, its presence in the media is nothing short of astounding.

As a former HBO brand ambassador myself, it’s true that I might be a little bit biased when I rave about the various HBO media campaigns over the years. But even if I am biased, it’s nice to know that I’m in good company. The network’s efforts and campaigns to promote Game of Thrones Season 4 were fantastic, but they weren’t nearly as important as what came from their audience on social media.

The night of the premiere brands flocked to Twitter to capitalize on the popularity and cult following of the show. Brand giants such as Delta, Pringles, Mentos, and even fellow political-drama House of Cards decided to pay homage. Some of these campaigns were relevant, several were clever, and most were silly; but they were all united in one thing: they all proved that there is a lot of digital traffic working for Game of Thrones.

In fact, the @GameofThrones Twitter handle proudly boasted that the fourth season’s premiere created the most social activity of any HBO original series episode ever, and I believe it. This stands in stark contrast to the premiere of AMC’s last (well, sort-of last) season of Mad Men, which according to Nielsen debuted to only 2.3 million viewers. In fact, it too got a shoutout from Delta on the night of its premiere, although despite having more favorites than Game of Thrones‘, people were curiously less likely to actually retweet it to their feed.

To be fair, Mad Men has done well digitally, just perhaps not as well as its peers. It’s been around longer than Game of Thrones and the Council for Research Excellence found that social media is proving to be twice as effective at attracting viewers to new shows than returning shows. Mad Men did manage to generate a trending topic on Facebook, which has been shown to be the most popular way of socially connected viewing, but it fell short of the buzz surrounding the shocking and now infamous “Purple Wedding” from Game of Thrones.

In Tweets alone, Game of Thrones saw 251,000 mentions while Mad Men brought in less than a fourth of that with 60,000. This might seem arbitrary until faced with the fact that, according to the same CRE study, 42% of viewers planned to watch a show after seeing it mentioned in a Tweet and 33% immediately change the channel to watch it live. So what does this mean? Being in its final season, Mad Men was surely expecting more hype from the digital stratosphere, but maybe it’s time to ditch the briefcase and invest in some dragons.