Twitter drives your TV show further

A HIGHLY engaged Twitter following is among the top five reasons people watch TV shows, according to a global Twitter executive.

The social network Twitter has launched ratings data for Australia ranking programs using the number of tweets about them.

A HIGHLY engaged Twitter following is among the top five reasons people watch TV shows and should drive up ratings and advertising prices, according to a global Twitter executive.

The social network yesterday launched Twitter TV Ratings data for Australia with research firm Nielsen, ranking programs based on the number of times tweets about them were seen when the show aired and in the three hours before and after.

The new data, which Twitter hopes will be used alongside existing OzTAM TV ratings, was presented at Twitter’s first “upfront” presentation to Australian advertisers in Sydney last night.

No Australian examples were available but according to US data from Nielsen, a 10 per cent rise in the number of times tweets about a TV show were seen during the “broadcast window” could result in a 1.8 per cent lift in live and consolidated ratings in the next week.

And more tweets helped boost live TV ratings almost a third of the time (29 per cent) — a figure that increased for live sport (46 per cent of the time) and reality TV (37 per cent).

The Nine Network is among the first in Australia to sign up to get the data, along with Ten, and will be able to release overnight Twitter ratings data for its shows.

“You can literally see the audience roar when there is a pivotal moment on screen,” said Fred Graver, Twitter’s global head of TV creative, who is in Australia for the ratings launch.

“We’re also seeing now that the audience that talks live or interacts with the live event on Twitter also comes back week after week after week.

“Twitter belongs in the top five causes (of TV viewing),” he said. “We are up there with word of mouth, marketing spend and on-air promotion.”

Preview data for Sunday night shows the Australian Open tennis final, which attracted 1.9 million metropolitan TV viewers, was also the top Twitter TV show, with 18,000 people tweeting a total of 47,100 times, creating four million Twitter impressions seen by about 215,000 people.

Ten’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!, which had the fourth-highest TV ratings, was second in the Twitter ratings with a unique audience of 153,000.

Shows such as the ABC’s Q&A, which has long posted live tweets along the bottom of the screen, have been pioneers in the medium, but sales departments have seen it as a competitor for advertising dollars. Twitter says that hesitation is beginning to be overcome. In the US, Viacom has started selling shows to advertisers based partly on social ratings.