Did someone in your Facebook feed spoil the ending to Breaking Bad for you last night? Don’t worry, no spoilers here if you haven’t seen it yet!The Wall Street Journal announced today that Facebook will begin sending weekly social media reports to the top four major television networks to display how much social chatter their shows are creating on the world’s largest social network. Facebook is currently measuring this engagement by totaling the Likes, comments and shares a post that contains information about a show that is airing on one of those networks.
This engagement is not something new. People have been talking about their favorite shows on Facebook for a long time. Facebook claims that between 88 and 100 million users are using Facebook while watching television. Many refer to this as “second screen viewing.” Facebook is not the only social network providing this information to television networks. Twitter recetly partnered with Nielsen to create a new ratings system called the “Nielsen Twitter TV Rating” that will debut sometime this fall. This new rating will provide information to the networks about how many conversations and tweets are taking place about a show or television event.
According to Mashable, 90% of VMA viewers shared their reactions to Miley Cyrus’ now infamous performance. As you can see, networks would be very interested in seeing these numbers. SocialGuide, a tool that measures mentions on Twitter calculated 11 million tweets about the show “Pretty Little Liars” during the first half of their season in early 2013. Nielsen released a study earlier this year stating “Using time series analysis, we saw a statistically significant causal influence indicating that a spike in TV ratings can increase the volume of Tweets, and, conversely, a spike in Tweets can increase tune-in,” said Paul Donato, the Chief Research Officer, Nielsen. “This rigorous, research-based approach provides our clients and the media industry as a whole with a better understanding of the interplay between Twitter and broadcast TV viewing.” Clearly, conversations are occurring and networks want to latch on to that especially to market that to advertisers.
I love to keep an eye on Twitter and Facebook during awards shows or during shows like “The Bachelor” to see what people are saying and I often tweet during some of my favorite shows. Do you?