Nielsen Starts Measuring Twitter's Impact on TV Ratings

It's official: Twitter's influence is becoming institutionalized. Given the announcement about its pending IPO, this is hardly a surprise - and the timing couldnt have been more convenient.

That bit of strategic corporate communications aside, the significance of traffic and commentary is now widely recognized. Twitter itself announced that sales of its data are approaching $50 million on an annual basis. Enterprises as diverse as Nielsen and the Library of Congress are capturing, cataloguing and sometimes re-selling Twitter commentary as a means of determining interest and potential commercial opportunity.

The Nielsen announcement is of particular importance because it signals the growing convergence between the old and new media. TV, increasingly, is influenced by Twitter commentary. And Twitter traffic is driven, to a large degree, by interest in TV shows. The two may spur additional viewing/participation which, in turn, may spark ad revenues.

The growth of interactivity is raising interest and funding for 'original content' designed to provoke and inspire. That Twitter or other social media participation may generate enhanced attention has long been bruited about - and hoped for. It's apparent arrival may signal the breakthrough in cross-channel commercialization on which so much of the early interest in Facebook and others based their IPOs.

Twitter's emergence as the avatar social media monetization makes sense because of the direct, causal relationship between commentary, viewership and ad rates. Life is rarely that simple. If the early data from Twitter model holds, the implications for digital commerce could be profoundly positive. JL

Seth Fiegerman reports in Mashable:

It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that Breaking Bad would dominate Twitter during the week of its series finale, but the real surprise is that networks can now tell just how well their shows performed on the social network compared to others
There were more than 1.2 million tweets about Breaking Bad during the week of Sept. 23, which reached nearly 9.3 million Twitter accounts, making it by far the most visible show on the social network.
The numbers come from Nielsen's new Twitter TV ratings, which officially launched on Monday and promises to quantify the number of users who post and view tweets about popular TV shows.

The ratings tool, which was first announced late last year, uses Twitter data to present the unique audience, impressions and tweets for top TV shows each week.
"The Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings are a powerful measurement with far reaching implications for the industry," Steve Hasker, president of global product leadership for Nielsen, said in a statement. Hasker describes the new metrics as a more "holistic measure" for "how Twitter activity influences TV engagement."
At the moment, though, it's unclear how accurate a gauge the Twitter TV ratings are and whether networks will — or should — pay attention to it. In the case of Breaking Bad, the reach indicated by the Twitter ratings — 9.3 million — is fairly close to the 10.3 million viewers who reportedly tuned in for the episode, according to separate Nielsen data.
However, the viewership and social data didn't match up quite so well for other shows. For example, an episode of The Voice rated a distant second for the week of the Breaking Bad finale with a Twitter audience of 3.8 million unique users, even though multiple episodes averaged significantly more viewers than Breaking Bad during that same week.
Still, at least some network representatives appeared optimistic about the potential for the new ratings at launch.
"We are just beginning to understand the dynamic relationship between social media and television," Beth Rockwood, SVP of market resources and ad sales for Discovery Communications, which owns the Discovery Channel, said in a statement. "New tools, like the Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings, that allow us to further investigate the relationship between individual programs and social media will bring new insights and raise new questions."
For Twitter, there may be even more at stake. The social networking company likely hopes to use the new metrics to show its value to major networks and attract more TV ad dollars as it prepares to go public.