The future of Twitter and Facebook in TV ad measurement
The differences between Twitter and Facebook have an enormous implication for data mining for television, says Mediaocean’s Sarah Lawson Johnston. So what does the future have in store?
Most of us realise that Facebook and Twitter aren’t the same – which is why we have and maintain profiles for both. This fact becomes even more important to recognise when you’re thinking of them in the context of leveraging them for insights into TV advertising.
In other words, how can user data from social profiles help drive effective advertising for brands? What are the differences between Twitter data and Facebook data, and what are the benefits of each for advertisers?
A good place to start is to establish the defining characteristics of the networks themselves. The short definitions are that Facebook is a network built around one’s social ties, while Twitter is primarily a socially-driven content platform.
That probably explains why one’s Facebook feed is usually made up of friends, family, colleagues, and so on – those you know personally and in the real world. A typical Twitter feed, on the other hand, includes musings from a host of people you don’t necessarily know personally – celebrities, brands, media… – but that you are interested in what they have to say.
There’s also the personal element to a Facebook profile – it asks you to fill in your relationship status, religious views, gender, and the like. On the other hand, Twitter simply wants you to give your name, location, a relevant website, headshot, and a short bio. And, of course, there’s privacy.
Even if nothing’s truly private on the Internet, it’s still fair to say that Facebook activity pretty much stays within the confines of your friend circle – in other words, within your social network. Twitter’s easily-searchable, typically public content, on the other hand, means that your Tweets are designed by nature to be broadcast.
At the end of the day, Twitter was created for sharing and receiving information and ideas; Facebook is designed to cement personal human ties (and sharing and receiving information and ideas in the process). Even the companies themselves establish this distinction in their messaging.
According to Facebook, its mission is: “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Meanwhile, Twitter describes itself as a business that: “helps you create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Facebook wants you to stay connected; Twitter wants you to blog instantaneously.
As I’m sure is becoming increasingly clear as you read this, the differences between the two platforms have an enormous implication for data mining for TV.
Let’s start with Twitter and its organic connection to TV measurement. Since its inception, TV advertising has been measured as a one-to-many medium: brands shoot a message into the millions, and then leverage ratings to understand how many potential consumers engaged with the brand.
Twitter’s one-talks-to-many content model fits right in with the one-to-many content model of TV. So does Twitter’s openness with data, that, again, is an extension of its position as a platform for broadcasting content.
As has been astutely observed elsewhere, the fact that Twitter is less private also means that it’s that much easier to mine the micro-blogging platform for information and to leverage its data.
So it’s no surprise that Twitter has, to a large extent, taken the lead on providing TV advertising insights – whether that’s in the form of Kantar’s partnership with Twitter on ad analytics, Nielsen/Twitter TV Ratings, or GFK’s similar partnership with Twitter in Germany.
Does this mean that Facebook doesn’t have a place in TV metrics? Not at all. First, the new partnership between Facebook and social analytics company SecondSync is a good indication that there’s a solid TV measurement future for the social network. But that’s not the only point here.
The real issue is that Facebook, because it’s a private network focused around human connections, it’s got a different kind of data at its fingertips: information about how you connect with other people – like when you’ll break up or, at the other extreme, what your wedding date might be.
However, TV has also served an entirely different, largely unmeasured role at the same time: that of being the world’s greatest ad-driven social glue. Therefore, although TV is bought and sold based on ratings that calculate the audience reach of a TV ad, the brand impact of “water cooler” conversation about ads and FA Cup pub gatherings (relatively) unrecorded.
This analysis is of the current social TV landscape – I am fully cognisant that it will likely evolve in the coming months and years. For example, Facebook’s foray into trending topics puts it in Twitter’s company of offering one-to-many social media content.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s possible upcoming redesign is poised to make Twitter much more personable. A lot could happen in the future of social TV. In whichever way the future of social TV ads evolves, I’ll update all my friends and followers on – Facebook and Twitter alike.