New study proves TV and tweet correlation
Nielsen has released findings, which, for the first time, provide statistical evidence of a two-way causal influence between broadcast TV tune-in for a program and the Twitter conversation around that programme.
Nielsen’s Twitter Causation Study included time series analysis to determine if Twitter activity drives increased tune-in rates for broadcast TV and vice versa, following research released earlier this year that quantified the correlation between TV ratings and Twitter.
Through analysing minute-to-minute trends in Nielsen’s Live TV Ratings and tweets for 221 broadcast programmes, the findings show that Live TV ratings had a statistically significant impact in related tweets among 48% of the episodes sampled, and that the volume of tweets caused notable changes in Live TV Ratings among 29% of the episodes.
The results also demonstrate that increases in TV ratings during an episode cause more people to tweet more often. Nielsen suggests that this may be because there are more people available to tweet about a show, or because more compelling content drives people to tweet more often.
“These results substantiate what many of our TV partners have been telling us anecdotally for years: namely, that Twitter drives tune-in, especially for live, linear television programming,” said Ali Rowghani, Twitter’s chief operating officer.
“As the world’s preeminent real-time social communication medium, Twitter is a complementary tool for broadcasters to engage their audience, drive conversation about their programming, and increase tune-in.”
Some industry experts have previously been sceptical about the mutually beneficial relationship between Twitter and TV, with Decipher’s Nigel Walley – a self-proclaimed Twitter ‘super-user’ – commenting earlier this year: “The difficult truth is that the majority of people within the UK television audience don’t use Twitter.
“This fact, that it only ever represents a small sub-set of an audience, has huge implications for Twitter as a measurement tool, let alone as an audience driver or advertising medium.”
Walley continues: “A major problem is that Twitter, and all the other social media formats, don’t seem to understand the difference between ‘scale’ and ‘reach’… We see too many social media presentations that quote the number of people that have accounts, or how many people use a service daily, or how many total interactions may have happened in a given moment.
“These are just scale numbers. Most of those interactions have no implication for the marketing industry and aren’t usable.”
More findings from the Nielsen Twitter Causation Study are available here.