People certainly like to tweet about the weather. You could even say Twitter is a real-time weather radar — a social Doppler of sorts. With that idea in mind, The Weather Channel is rolling out Twitter integration across TV, Weather.com and its mobile apps that lets you see real-time weather tweets in your town.
For example, New York and Oklahoma City are showing the most tweets right now on Weather.com. I clicked on Oklahoma City (below), and it displayed a filtered feed of weather-related tweets from the metro area. (Turns out there are thunderstorms there, hence the spike in tweets.)
The same tweets also appear on each localized forecast page on Weather.com, which is the most popular weather site on the web. The Weather Channel worked with Twitter and Trendrr to provide the integration and filtering.
“Twitter gives voice and context to the topics people are most interested in, and everyone is interested in the weather,” said Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s director of content and programming. “We’re excited to make Tweets an integral part of weather reports on television, online and mobile. By surfacing these conversations and providing human context around factual weather information, The Weather Channel Social brings weather alive.”
Weather.com has also rolled out 220 local Twitter accounts for populations of 200,000 or more. The accounts automatically update every three hours (or so) with a local forecast, and they’re promoted with a “Follow this Forecast” link on Weather.com’s local weather pages — which means they should drive up those follower counts rather quickly. (For local media that sees this as new social competition, just remember, personal tweets trump robotic tweets.)
TWC’s iPhone app just pushed an update today with the tweets in your town feature, and producers plan to integrate Twitter on air, too. Explains the press release, “Throughout TWC coverage, it will highlight how people enjoy a perfect – or less than ideal – weather day and will celebrate the network’s most influential viewers. During severe weather, social will be a powerful tool that will enable TWC to tell a complete story of how a weather event is making its impact locally.” The social integration is sponsored across the board by Citi.
TWC’s move to integrate Twitter — and to expand social coverage into local markets — certainly makes a lot of sense. On an average day, 200 tweets per minute talk about the weather in the U.S, jumping to 500 on weather days.
“Weather is the ultimate social content; it’s guaranteed to spark conversation among family, friends and complete strangers,” said Cameron Clayton, executive vice president of digital products of TWCC. “Adding Social to all of our platforms makes our storytelling more complete, enabling us to partner our expertise and forecasting with real-time local input about the weather from our consumers in a way that is relevant and personal.”