Nielsen is launching a new rating for TV shows that gauges Twitter traffic, rolling out a ratings addition it first announced in December. The new Twitter TV Rating measures how many people are tweeting about TV shows, and how many users are seeing their posts on Twitter.
Nielsen is putting a ratings standard on a social media metric that its own studies showed have a causal relationship with TV ratings. In August, the firm released a study of 221 episodes of primetime TV programs where it found nearly half of the shows drove traffic to Twitter as their ratings spiked, and conversely 29 percent of the shows saw their ratings benefit from buzz on Twitter that drove people to tune in. Not surprisingly, competitive reality shows got the biggest boost from Twitter. Genres that followed in order of their Twitter popularity were comedy, sports and drama. There’s a brief on the study here.
Source: USA Today
