Commentary

20 Million Tweet Their TV in Q1; Events, Reality Dominate



After all of the elaborate companion apps and synchronized viewing experiments that networks, third parties and marketers continue to pursue, the simple Tweet remains Americans’ preferred mode of second screening. According to Nielsen’s SocialGuide, 20 million of us produced more than 300 million Tweets about television programming in Q1. The user interactions reflected engagement with more than 9,000 programs.

SocialGuide has initiated weekly reports on the most actively Tweeted programs as well as overnight reports at its web site.  For the week of June 24-30, BET overwhelmed virtually all other programming with its BET Awards 2013 show Sunday night. Viewers generated almost 10 million Tweets, more than ten times the volume of the next highest ranking show on the SocialGuide chart, MTV’s Catfish: The TV Show, which generated 776,155 Tweets. BET’s pre-awards Red Carpet coverage only added to the network’s Twitter triumph, as more than 375,000 exchanges occurred around that show.

Not surprisingly, the most tweeted programs tended to be live events and reality programming, including Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta (VH1), WWE Monday Night RAW (USA), Big Brother (CBS) and The Bachelorette (ABC). ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars, Showtime’s Dexter, and MTV’s Teen Wolf were the only scripted shows to make the top ten.

During Sunday night (June 30) prime time, the 9.9 million tweets around the BET Awards were generated by 1.16 million unique users. During the height of the Twitter activity, between 500,000 and 600,000 TV-related messages were being produced every 15 minutes.  

Much of the Twitter interaction over the BET Awards was being fueled by celebrity participation. Everyone from LeBron James to Diddy, Drake, and LeAnn Rimes were chiming in with commentary on winners and performances to #BETAwards and #BET. Award sponsors such as Gillette, Pantene, Coca-Cola, Ford, Cadillac, all enjoyed mentions during and after the event in the @BETAwards feed. The cable network announced today that 7.6 million total viewers were drawn to the Sunday night event. It claimed to own 51% of all the social TV chatter for the night.

Twitter itself has been positioning itself as the second screen app of choice. It purchased social TV metrics firm Bluefin Labs earlier this year to help support its efforts. Nielsen purchased its own social TV measurement company in SocialGuide late last year.

While many third party platforms such as Zeebox, Yahoo’s IntoNow, Shazam, Viggle, GetGlue and others try to create various levels of synchronized material and activations in the living room, it is still unclear how much two-screen manipulation most users are interested in managing. Many of the first generations of second screen apps proved too cluttered and burdensome. In many case the Twitter feed around a given show proves to be the central attraction anyway.

For the time being at least, it appears that the 140 character format from a most familiar platform is the default second screen mode for most of us.  

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