Twitter and Kantar Media last week unveiled “the UK’s official Twitter metric for measuring Twitter TV audience engagement.”
Kantar, a WPP subsidiary, has been developing the metric with Twitter for the past year and it will be made available beginning in mid-October.
Here’s what the new metrics will include:
- Unique authors (people Tweeting) and their affinity to brands, channels and programs;
- Unique audience – using data only available to Kantar Media we are able to measure the number of individuals who viewed Tweets related to individual programs/shows
- Impressions – the total number of times that a Tweet or Retweet has been seen about a particular program
This is in addition to existing metrics:
- Number of Tweets and Retweets about a programme before, during and after transmission;
- Average Tweets per minute and the highest volume of Tweets per minute ascribed to the program in question;
Kantar has also developed Instar Social, a dashboard that broadcasters, agencies and advertisers can use to view and analyze TV data in real time.
The new metrics sound good, but Sean Hargrave for MediaPost wonders why such an emphasis is still put on impressions – especially because we know at this point that appearing in a Twitter stream does not necessarily mean it was viewed. The unique authors data, and its corresponding brand and channel affinity information, though, should definitely make targeting – something that’s been elusive on Twitter – much easier for social TV advertisers.