Kantar Media has today unveiled the UK’s official Twitter metric for measuring Twitter TV audience engagement. Developed with Twitter as part of a global partnership announced last year, the new Kantar Twitter TV Ratings tools will be available from mid-October.
The tool, bringing together geo-filtered UK Twitter data with Kantar’s audience research it will enable broadcasters, media agencies and advertisers to track how Twitter amplifies TV audiences.
The Twitter TV ratings will include new metrics, including unique tweeters and their affinity to brands, channels and programmes; the measurement of the number of individuals who viewed tweets related to individual TV shows and impressions – defined as the total number of times that a tweet or retweet has been seen about a particular programme.
“The launch of the first official Twitter TV metrics in the UK gives the broadcast industry official insight for social TV engagement to complement the BARB gold-standard TV measurement currency,” said Andy Brown, global CEO and chairman of Kantar Media.
“Using the Kantar Twitter TV Ratings; broadcasters, planners and advertisers will be able to assess programmes and series, plan programme promotions more effectively and assist media buyers and sellers to integrate social data more comprehensively into the TV component of their media mix.”
In addition to the new metrics, Kantar Media has also developed a dashboard, Instar Social, that broadcasters, media agencies and advertisers can use to view and analyse data alongside their existing TV analysis tools.
Instar Social will include a live, real-time leader-board, providing a snapshot of the top tweeted programmes as they happen, with the ability to view actual content of the tweets in real-time.
Further enhancements scheduled for release include trending topics that are driven by a programme, integration of BARB gold-standard ratings data and API data feeds.
Separately, data will be released around sports, with football, F1, tennis and rugby already announced as data-sets with the potential of more to come.
The news comes after the release of research from Kantar that shows one in ten shows gain viewers during broadcast as a direct result of tweets.
A Year in the Life of TV and Twitter, published last month, provides the first in-depth look at the relationship between what we say and read about on Twitter and what we are watching in the UK, revealing that Twitter activity can provide key insights into TV viewing for brands and broadcasters.
Based on a year’s worth of exclusive data from Twitter and BARB, the research found that for 11% of programmes Twitter activity boosted audiences by an estimated 2%.
