Twitter continues its quest to encourage the TV industry to put tweets to work on-air. Today Twitter’s Media team, headed by Chloe Sladden, posted a handy guide for producers to use Twitter on TV. The company shares interesting and compelling graphs and data showing the correlation between tweets and television on-air. If you’re too lazy to read their entire post, here’s a summary of the sections.
The Motivation
Twitter offers some tweet data compared against airtimes. In the example of ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars, the data proves that the most action happens around the initial airing. In the MTV VMAs example, data shows the climbing buzz around act of the show, culminating in Beyonce’s belly rub.
Hashtags
Twitter recommends promoting an official hashtag and cites, #glee, #himym (How I Met Your Mother) and True Blood as examples.
Synchronize dramatic moments with hashtags like The Voice did.
“Madlib Hashtags,” are described as conversation starter hashtags like the VMAs used #whatwillgagawear. 106th and Park, the most followed TV show does this every day.
Accounts
Show accounts on air, which they describe through the fact that @piersmorgan got 4,500 new followers in one night for doing this on-air on CNN.
Live tweet during shows, citing Jeff Probst from Survivor on CBS and Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain
Tweets
Twitter recommends to show tweets on TV from celebrities and with images and reccomend to curate and show tweets on an in-set display using Mass Relevance.
Guidelines
They link to their general and broadcast guidelines for displaying tweets.
Social TV Ratings
They recommend Trendrr (aggregates data across multiple social platforms) and Brooklyn-based Social Guide (their algorithm primarily listens for Twitter and compares it to the Electronic Program Guide data they license from Tribune Media Services).