Nielsen has added Instagram to its Social Content Ratings (SCR), allowing it to measure TV engagement across all three top social networks.
Launched in 2016, Nielsen SCR is a standardized third-party measurement of TV program-related social media activity on Facebook, Twitter and now Instagram. To put it simply, TV audiences talk about shows on social media and Nielsen tracks it so networks and advertisers better understand reception and ROI. This measurement includes organic audience activity as well as social content through official talent, network and program accounts.
Adding Instagram to SCR makes sense—with over 500 million daily active users, the Facebook-owned social network creates a conduit between TV networks and cord-cutting millennials. According to a recent study by the Consumer Technology Association, 55 percent of millennial respondents expressed a preference for self-recorded and on-demand TV, compared to 45 percent who prefer live broadcasts.
TV networks already use Instagram to reach audiences prior to and during a show’s run. While onboard analytics provide engagement results for promoted posts, measuring organic conversations are another matter.
Nielsen SCR has observed increased social media engagement while a show is on the air, driving 68 percent of weekly program-related Tweets. For the 2016-2017 TV season, fans of The Walking Dead generated an average of two million social interactions about the program across Facebook and Twitter. Empire also created a lot of social buzz to the tune of 860,000 social interactions per episode.
Social interactions inspired by TV shows aren’t limited to the subject matter alone, Nielsen found.
“Through our Twitter TV and Twitter brand data, we found that the people who Tweet about TV are more likely to Tweet about brands,” Erika Faust, SVP client service at Nielsen Social told AListDaily. “Therefore, marketers who are looking to generate more earned media around their brand should use the social TV signal to identify shows with high social ratings as well as those that have a high alignment to their brand Tweeting audience.”
According to a 2016 study by Simply Measured, over half of the marketers surveyed named “measuring ROI” as the number one challenge they face. In fact, only 9.4 percent of marketers said they were able to quantify the revenue driven by social media.
Nielsen hopes that by adding Instagram to its SCR, marketers will gain better insights into how their shows impact audiences across different social networks.
