The newly launched Twitter TV Ratings service by broadcast research giant Nielson will measure who is tweeting about which programs and how many followers are reading each tweet.
In a story posted on
USA Today, Nielsen reports the television-tweeting audience is 50 times bigger than regular tweeters, who randomly compose the 40-character-or-less messages and send them off into the Twittersphere. The goal of the service is to capture and analyze the social aspect of TV programming, whether previously recorded or live.
"As the experience of TV viewing continues to evolve, our TV partners have consistently asked for one common benchmark from which to measure the engagement of their programming," said Chloe Sladden, the social-media company's vice president of media. "This new metric is intended to answer that request and to act as a complement and companion to the Nielsen TV rating."
Nielsen has experienced monumental jumps in tweets about live shows: 263 million in the second quarter of this year. That marked a 24-percent jump from the same period in 2013. As an example, this year's Super Bowl spurred 24 million tweets.
Previously recorded shows also have impressive Twitter statistics. The season finale of Breaking Bad garnered an all-time-high 1.24 million tweets.
"It's exciting that investments are being made to build 360 degree engagement, and drive passion from viewers, around programming," Nielsen's Steve Hasker said to USA Today in a statement. "This holistic measure of how Twitter activity influences TV engagement will bring clarity to the value of those efforts."
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