Brooklyn-based SocialGuide recently rolled out a new analytics platform, and it just launched a new report within their Social Guide Intelligence (SGI) tool called “Insight” which provides “the most comprehensive look at Twitter TV behavior across US TV,” according to founder Sean Casey. He shared with us the March report, looking across 7.7M uniques, 48.2M comments and 5,364 social TV programs that aired. It broke down which TV program types and genres drive the most social activity.
While we intuitively know that sports is a big social TV driver, it accounted for 44% of the social conversation in March, thanks in part to the NCAA playoffs. But the playoffs and other sports accounted for only 1.36% of the month’s programming. And it’s not just a March Madness thing: “Our data shows that live sports events constitute somewhere between one and three percent of all TV programming, but about 50 percent of all social activity is being driven by sports events,” which includes regional sports games, explained Casey at the Social TV Summit.
The March SocialGuide numbers also found that reality programming account for 7% of series broadcast but drove 14% of the conversation. And drama accounted for 2.46% of series but precipitated 8% of the conversation.
The biggest program type was feature films at 43.51%, but it only accounted for 4.94% of the social activity. This points to a very large opportunity that exists in social for TV companies. Films are especially difficult to attract buzz, which means that social TV campaigns could really help drive increased ratings. USA Network recently launched a campaign with Viggle for To Kill A Mockingbird, FX leveraged GetGlue around “FX Has the Movies,” and more networks are seeing this canvas for experimentation. These “Insights” should definitely be used not just to see where there is currently lots of chatter, but where there isn’t.