The below post is part of our 2014 Social TV Year-in-Review guest post series and is written by Twitter Head of TV Andrew Adashek.
When it comes to the relationship between brands and networks to viewers, fans and celebs, we’ve reached the golden age of transaction and interaction. Today success is all about how you connect with an audience, deliver your product and structure your revenue model on that experience in all the places you are and they are. So now the challenge is to understand who your audience is, what signals they’re paying attention to and how to move to those signals.
We work with broadcasters to come up with ideas about making the most out of live events and offer our best practices about how to prepare for memorable moments. It goes without saying that Ellen’s famous selfie at the Oscars in March was an ideal display of meaningful content that became truly iconic, with its huge public reach and distribution. It did not happen by accident. The “Golden Tweet” a.k.a. the most Retweeted of 2014, generated more than 3.3M Retweets, and was seen more than 31 million times across Twitter’s embedded, mobile and desktop products. That’s almost as many as the 43 million viewers who watched the show.
Taking advantage of our real-time platform is one of the strongest plays you can make. With the #VoiceSave hashtag, “The Voice” lays claim to the most-Tweeted series minute of 2014 (310,000 Tweets at 8:59 p.m. ET), surpassing even the Super Bowl’s highest minute. (The May 13 episode also holds the record for the most-Tweeted about TV episode since Nielsen Social began measuring the conversation in 2011.) As viewers were empowered to keep their favorite performers from being eliminated, a legion of fans was integrated into the show in a consequential way – and it was in real time.
Scripted series also dominated this year’s list of the most buzzed-about TV, and much of this was fueled by having the stars of the shows engage with audiences by live-Tweeting. From “Pretty Little Liars”’ massive 15-person live-Tweeting party in advance of the spring finale to the ABC primetime cast members from shows like “Scandal” Tweeting for #Shondaland and #TGIT week to week, these programs put their best assets front and center. This practice has been found to not only drive Tweet volume, but it can build a Twitter audience with huge returns in follower growth.
These followers bring many more benefits than just volume and audience, too. A recent Ipsos study found those who Tweet are more media-savvy and more likely to pay for content than non-Tweeters. As we see the rise of SVOD and networks moving in the direction of a la carte, if we are trying to find audiences that will pay for premium content, Twitter is a powerful indicator of who they might be. In addition, Twitter users consider themselves media influencers, and are more likely to be a source of TV information for friends and family. Showrunners for programs like “Pretty Little Liars” already depend on Twitter for feedback from fans – who have even influenced the course of the plot based on what they’re saying.
The ability to measure the Twitter conversation around shows has helped social TV evolve by bringing a meaningful new dimension to evaluating its success. Imagine a quadrant where one axis is traditional ratings and the other is engagement, measured by Twitter activity and impressions per the Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings. While research has shown a correlation between ratings and Twitter impressions, we’re also seeing other benefits. A study by FOX, for example, found that 90% of Twitter users who saw Tweets about TV during primetime hours took action to further engage with the show – whether to watch, search for or share content about it, both on and off of Twitter.
Twitter was not intentionally designed to be the second screen companion to TV, but given the product was born on mobile, the vast majority of the Tweets that are shared are public and information flows in real time, it has become very clear that Twitter acts as a force multiplier enhancing the impact and possibilities of TV. In 2015, social TV’s winners will be the networks and shows that create real-time moments of consequence with viewers in fresh and relevant ways, and the brand partners willing to facilitate those conversations.