On Monday, Twitter launched its new TV ratings to quantify the number of users who post and see tweets about popular TV shows.
Twitter has become ingrained with TV engagement. All types of TV shows are attempting to engage their viewership, especially real time viewership, and leverage the free reach social media can provide by prompting audiences to tweet about the content. Hashtags have become commonplace during shows, giving users a common terminology to use.
Twitter is now taking that one level further with their TV ratings program as a "holistic" measure for how Twitter impacts TV engagement. It continues to be a question though what do these new ratings mean, and how accurate are they really. The Twitter ratings have frequently not meshed with the reported Nielsen rating. It is not necessarily a 1:1 ratio of viewership to Twitter usage. The connection between the two, and even social media to TV engagement as a whole, is only understood at the surface. Twitter activity is directionally persuasive at minimum, and probably more important than that. A strong Twitter presence is likely a clear signal about the popularity of a program. It is also a solid measure of the engagement of the content with the fans. However, it may still be early to base major decisions around Twitter activity for TV networks.
I would assume this would continue to be an important initiative of Twitter as a potential huge source of income for Twitter, especially as the company prepares to go public. As digital companies continue to look beyond traditional digital advertising for other revenue streams, working with TV networks to understand and capture additional viewership and free advertising from loyal friends may, can be a great way for Twitter to use its data. It just may take more time before TV networks can fully understand how to leverage the data that Twitter is providing.
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