UK study confirms TV-Twitter link

A new study shows that Twitter can boost TV viewing during a broadcast with smaller channels able to make their presence felt through effective Twitter strategies, Broadband TV News reports.

Kantar Media’s A Year in the Life of TV and Twitter studied a year’s worth of data from Twitter and BARB. It found the Top 30 TV series – excluding live news and sport – accounted for 50% of all measured UK Twitter TV activity and 9% of viewing volume.

Twitter TV activity correlates with audience size at a broad level: the shows with the largest volume of Twitter TV activity tend to have higher audiences. However smaller shows can gain disproportionate levels of Twitter activity if they are ‘social TV friendly’, for example encouraging participation or skewing to a younger audience.

“People have always talked about TV with friends and family, and Twitter extends these conversations outside the living room,” says Andy Brown, Global CEO of Kantar Media. “This extensive study illustrates the positive correlation between Twitter and TV in the UK, but also shows that it is not as straightforward as assuming that a high number of viewers results in a large volume of tweets. ‘Twitter friendly’ shows that encourage tweets during the broadcast or have a younger, evangelical audience for example, can punch above their weight, thereby distorting overall perceptions. This illustrates how proactive encouragement of social TV activity can positively impact programming schedules and advertising campaigns.

The X-Factor delivered 9.4m Tweets over the year, winning the title for highest annual number of Tweets for a series and accounting for 8.6% of all TV related Tweets across the year and 25% of all Tweets in the weeks it was on air.

The Most Tweeted about drama program was the 50th anniversary edition of Doctor Who with 501,000 Tweets.