Social media’s link to TV viewing questioned
The relationship between social media and TV has come under scrutiny by NBCUniversal’s head of research, Alan Wurtzel, who has said that the likes of Twitter and Facebook are not yet game changers able to influence television viewing.
In a Financial Times article published on Friday, Wurtzel cited new research on media habits observed during the Sochi Winter Olympics where more than 1,500 hours of coverage was broadcast.
Wurtzel said NBCU had expected social media to have a “dominating” effect on viewing yet just 19% of the audience took to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
“A lot of people want to show that they are on the cutting edge,” he told the FT. “One of the things that is on the cutting edge is social media…Why wouldn’t I want to say to you, ‘We have a potent new way in which we can drive ratings?'”
However, the researcher said: “it just isn’t true…I am saying the emperor wears no clothes. It is what it is. These are the numbers.”
Twitter recorded 10.6 million Olympic-related messages posted by 3 million different users. On Facebook, about 20 million people made Olympic-related interactions on the platform, reaching a total of 150 million users.
The findings led Wurtzel to claim that a show’s ratings are more likely to drive activity on social media rather than vice versa.
Other 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 last 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 also said: “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.”
However, in a recent report, ratings body Nielsen claimed to show a two-way causal influence between broadcast TV tune-in for a programme and the Twitter conversation around that programme.
Through analysing minute-to-minute trends in Nielsen’s Live TV Ratings and tweets for 221 broadcast programmes, the ratings body said it could 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 demonstrated 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.”