Nielsen in the US yesterday launched its long-awaited Twitter TV Ratings, which measures the total activity and reach of TV-related conversations on the platform. Australia could be next.
Although a firm date has yet to be announced, Monique Perry, Nielsen head of media industry group, said Australia was a "key market" and could be one of the next markets globally to launch a social TV measurement solution. Localisation work on the platform is expected to take some time.
"As part of Nielsen's strategy to provide our clients with the most meaningful insights into the reach, resonance and reaction of their media content and advertising campaigns, we are in discussion with local advertisers, media owners and publishers to understand their needs on measuring social TV," she said.
Steve Hasker, Nielsen's president of global product leadership, told delegates at the Nielsen conference in Sydney earlier this year that he would like Australia to be the second market to launch the company's social measurement suite.
The initial data indicates the Twitter TV audience for a given episode of a show is 50 times larger on average than the authors generating tweets. That means if 2,000 people are tweeting about a program, 100,000 people are seeing those tweets – although the multiplier decreases as the number of 'authors' increases.
Nielsen has been granted access to Twitter's back-end in order to measure the number of people that saw the TV-related tweets. It believes that the metric is significant for advertisers because until now, only the number of tweets and respective authors has been measurable, not the total number of impressions of those tweets. The ratings combine both Twitter TV-specific activity (authors and tweets) and reach (unique audience and impressions).
According to Nielsen, Twitter conversation about live TV in the US has increased markedly over the past two years, with 19 million people composing 263 million tweets in Q2 2013 – a 24% year-on-year increase in authors and a 38% increase in tweets.
Twitter vice president Joel Lunenfeld told Bloomberg recently the push to engagement-based ratings was long overdue. "When you think about the $70 billion TV industry, for 65 years it's been traded on one currency, the rating – how many people are watching," he said.
"For the first time we're looking at a different angle, which is engagement – how many people are talking about the show and specifically on Twitter, how many people are tweeting and engaging with the show."
Mindshare chief digital officer Ciaran Norris said it would be “another piece of the puzzle” for advertisers. “It's the first attempt to do something a bit different, so there's obviously a lot to be done, but it's still a bit of extra insight we don't necessarily have at the moment.
“The TV rating system is a very successful way of measuring effectiveness using proxy metrics essentially – no advertiser says, 'I want to reach 10,000 adults', they want to shift 500 boxes of whatever – so to have a new, perhaps more sophisticated proxy measure is really interesting.”
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