AS NIELSEN BEGINS TO TRACK HOW SHOWS GET TWEETED, NETWORKS SEE TWITTER'S REACH CONFINED TO SMALL GROUPS OF FANS. "I THINK IT MAYBE ADDS A TENTH OF A RATING POINT. I DON'T THINK IT'S SIGNIFICANT," SAYS FORMER FOX SCHEDULING CHIEF PRESTON BECKMAN.
On Monday, Nielsen unveiled its much-anticipated Twitter TV ratings, showing which television shows had the greatest reach on the social networking platform. The report heightened the already deafening buzz surrounding Twitter, which, as it nears an IPO, has been stressing its cozy relationship with TV and the ad revenue that it generates from that relationship.
Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings Weekly Top Ten list is ranked by Unique Audience and include four metrics for each of the top episodes.
- Tweets - Tweets ascribed to a linear TV episode.
- Unique Authors – Unique Twitter accounts that have sent at least one Tweet ascribed to a specific TV episode.
- Impressions - The number of times any Tweets ascribed to a TV episode were seen.
- Unique Audience – The total number of distinct Twitter accounts accruing at least one impression of one or more different Tweets ascribed to a TV episode.
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But the findings ultimately confirmed what many in Hollywood have long suspected: Twitter's reach is limited to a relatively small pool of fans when it comes to overall television viewership. For example, some of the most-watched shows in TV, such as The Big Bang Theory and NCIS, each of which regularly draws 20 million viewers, are small-fry when it comes to Twitter. Neither made the top 10 list of most-tweeted shows, which for the week of Sept. 30-Oct. 6, was dominated by reality TV shows such as The X Factor (7 million viewers) and shows that skewed toward young females (Twitter's biggest demo), such as The Vampire Diaries (2.6 million viewers) and Glee (4.5 million viewers).
A few shows, such as Breaking Bad, are popular both in the ratings and on Twitter.
None of this is news to broadcast network executives. As Dave Poltrack, chief research officer at CBS, told Fast Company:
"The fact is that it's a very small percentage of the people in the country who participate in the Twitter phenomenon. The total amount of discussion about TV programming on a daily basis, most of that takes place by word of mouth--face-to-face conversations and typical conversations. Even if you look at online social communication, Facebook accounts for far more activity than Twitter does. From what we glean from our own numbers, the online conversations on Facebook are much more highly correlated with ratings than the Twitter conversations are."
According to Poltrack, just 10% of the TV-viewing population tweets while watching, as opposed to the 35% to 50% that boosters want to claim.
This, he says, accounts for why a movie like Sharknado managed to become a Twitter phenomenon last summer, yet failed to score high ratings.
Preston Beckman, Fox's longtime scheduling chief who is now a consultant for the network, voiced similar skepticism toward the causal relationship between tweeting and ratings.
"I think it maybe adds a tenth of a rating point. I don't think it's significant."
Beckman did allow, though, that "live events like awards shows--the Emmys, Oscars, and Grammys--is an area were Twitter is a way to build a large community that discusses the event while it's happening.
"It's a way to really connect to the fans of the shows and to hear what they think of shows. So that's a value. But I think we build it up--like writing an article about it makes it seem like it's probably more important than it is. It sounds good. It's cool. It's social media. It's what we're supposed to be talking about."
Still, even Twitter's biggest skeptics in Hollywood are not totally dismissing it. Poltrack, who described Twitter's largest demo as "younger females who tend to watch reality shows It's a phenomenon, a growing phenomenon," said.
"And these are younger viewers that you want to capture, so we are very much focussed on this. Among the people who participate in (Twitter), it is enhancing the viewing experience and creating more of an appointment kind of experience. It's getting them to watch live more than on the DVR, which is something we want."
Ultimately, people like Poltrack want more. Of the new Nielsen numbers, he said,
"That's fine, because it tells you something about what 10% of the population is doing. But it's not enough. We want to know what the other 90% is doing."
COMMENTARY: The investigation by Nielsen, the name most clearly associated with TV ratings in the U.S., suggests that Twitter really can drive ratings up. The New York Times calls this a "first-of-its-kind" study of how Twitter causes people to actually engage in watching particular TV shows, but the results are being taken with a grain of salt.
Nielsen looked at Twitter's timeline and tried to correlate it on a minute-by-minute basis with Nielsen's own prime time ratings for 221 episodes of mainstream shows. Apparently Nielsen's data showed that Twitter caused a "significant increase" in ratings 29% of the time.
A 30% influence on ratings is nothing to scoff at, and suggests Twitter exerts dramatic power over what people watch. But the New York Times is skeptical, and for good reason. Twitter and Nielsen are partners trying to promote a new ratings scale called the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating. Analysts would want to compare a 30% influence with other forms of TV ratings influencers like newspaper review columns or big-spend PR campaigns. Also, Nielsen's study is blind to the influence Twitter has on TV show watching that isn't captured by Nielsen's ratings. But we can probably say Twitter is more influential on how we watch TV than even the TV ratings makers are prepared to admit--something industry executives like the producer of Wife Swap, Stephen Lambert, already know.
The study backs up an earlier one, which was another Nielsen product.
Courtesy of an article dated October 15, 2013 appearing in Fast Company and an article dated August 6, 2013 appearing in Fast Company
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