Twitter for Advertisers?

After reading the blog post on (e)Merging Media about how Twitter going public will affect Twitter users, I wanted to do more research into how advertisers might use Twitter.

What I find interesting about Twitter in the past few years is that it has become a trend to Tweet while a live-show is on.   Nielsen has recognized this trend and on October 7 launched “Nielsen Twitter TV ratings,” which is the “first-ever measure of the total activity and reach of TV-related conversation on Twitter.”   Nielsen’s initial findings revealed that the “Twitter TV audience for an episode is, on average, 50 times larger than the authors who are generating those tweets” so if “2,000 people are tweeting about a program, 100,000 people are seeing those tweets.”

The Nielsen Company even purchased Social Guide, an analytics company, because they felt that social media (specifically Twitter) has transformed the traditional TV experience.  As you can see here  Social Guide shows the top shows that were tweeted about in one evening:

Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings

Daily Top Five 11/07/2013

RANK	NETWORK	PROGRAM	UNIQUE AUDIENCE (000)	IMPRESSIONS (000)	UNIQUE AUTHORS (000)	TWEETS (000)
1	ABC	Scandal	1,505.9	9,796.3	54.7	186.5
2	FOX	Glee	1,341.3	4,433.2	46.0	123.9
3	FOX	The X Factor	1,208.4	4,219.7	54.4	147.6
4	The CW	The Vampire Diaries	1,115.6	2,957.5	37.0	89.5
5	NBC	The Voice	964.0	2,612.2	34.4	71.1

And also data for the entire week:

 Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings

Weekly Top Ten 10/28 – 11/03

RANK	NETWORK	PROGRAM	DATE	UNIQUE AUDIENCE (000)	IMPRESSIONS (000)	UNIQUE AUTHORS (000)	TWEETS (000)
1	AMC	The Walking Dead	11/03/13	4,254.9	19,920.5	176.5	359.4
2	ABC	Dancing with the Stars	10/28/13	2,240.0	7,491.3	32.4	59.3
3	NBC	Saturday Night Live	11/02/13	2,147.1	6,509.2	42.4	70.4
4	FOX	The X Factor	10/29/13	1,933.8	9,946.9	94.1	372.5
5	FX	American Horror Story: Coven	10/30/13	1,838.8	4,440.2	67.9	126.2
6	NBC	The Voice	10/28/13	1,628.4	4,174.6	49.6	94.0
7	MTV	Awkward.	10/29/13	1,605.7	3,433.6	52.7	75.8
8	ESPN2	2013 Gold Glove Awards	10/29/13	1,579.9	7,599.6	27.5	41.5
9	ABC	Scandal	10/31/13	1,548.5	10,530.7	52.6	193.8
10	USA	WWE Monday Night RAW	10/28/13	1,486.4	10,119.5	53.9	189.8

Another specific example was the two-hour season premiere of Grey’s Anatomy in September.  During that show 98,600 people tweeted 225,000 posts, but what makes it amazing is that those posts were seen by 2.8 million distinct Twitter accounts.

Executives at Nielsen speculate “that TV networks will start to promote their Twitter TV Ratings performance the same way they do broadcasting ratings.”  Which this seems like a good way for networks to be able to quickly gauge whether or not their new or old show is still generating viewership and conversation.

I rarely watch TV shows live.  I prefer to let them go into my Hulu queue and then watch them when I prefer (and with less commercials).  But the one caveat to that is the Bachelorette, awards shows, and sometimes football.  I will plop myself down in the living room, pull out my iPad mini, pull up Twitter and follow along the news feed to see what people think of the latest gentleman to exit the limo or what people thought about the fumble in the first three minutes.  So not only is the network benefiting because I am sitting there watching their show and the commercials, I also enjoy it because of the online interactions.  (Plus, sometimes the tweets are even better than what is actually going on.)

What about you?  Do you follow your Twitter new sfeed while watching live-television?