Nielsen is launching Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings, a measure of the total activity and reach of TV-related conversation on Twitter, the company announced this week.
Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings measure both the number of people tweeting about TV programs and the larger audience of people viewing those Tweets.
Initial analysis of Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings reveals that the Twitter TV audience for an episode is, on average, 50 times larger than the authors who are generating Tweets. For example, if 2000 people are tweeting about a program, 100,000 people are seeing those Tweets.
This multiplier varies across programs, with early data showing the multiplier decreases as the number of authors for an episode increases. This is due to the increasing overlap of followers for shows with a large number of Twitter authors, where a single follower is increasingly likely to follow multiple authors.
Twitter conversation about live TV in the United States has grown dramatically over the past two years. A total of 19 million unique people in the country composed 263 million Tweets about live TV in the second quarter of the year, a 24 percent year-over-year increase in authors and a 38 percent increase in Tweet volume, according to SocialGuide.
Until now, only the amount of Tweets and respective Twitter authors has been measurable. Measurement of the audience of people who view those Tweets is beneficial to television networks, local stations and ad agencies needing to quantify the audience.
Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings enable TV networks to measure the full Twitter engagement surrounding their programs, to measure the effectiveness of Twitter TV-related audience engagement strategies and to better understand the relationship between Twitter and tune-in. Additionally, Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings assist agencies and advertisers in making data-driven media planning and buying decisions that incorporate the full impact of Twitter TV.
