• by Wayne Friedman , October 11, 2013

As Twitter activity about TV continues to climb, saturation can occur. While a Nielsen report says the TV-related tweets are rising, “the ratio of the Twitter audience to authors decreases as the number of authors grows” -- due to an overlap in the number of followers.

Nielsen says in the second quarter of this year there was a 38% rise in tweets about TV to 263 million -- up from 190 million in the second period a year before. In addition, there was a 24% hike in the number of “authors” -- those writing the tweets -- to 19 million, up from 15 million.

As Nielsen has noted recently, the average Twitter TV audience yields on average 50 times that the number of authors tweeting about TV.

The Twitter-related TV show that recently performed the best in the new Nielsen Twitter TV ratings was series-ending “Breaking Bad” on AMC -- tallying up leading honors (Sept. 23-29) with a unique audience of 9.3 million, yielding 129.6 million impressions. This came from 601,400 unique authors writing up 1.24 million tweets.

NBC’s “The Voice” was next -- but way down from “Bad” with 3.8 million in unique audience; 13.96 million impressions; 138,200 authors; and 273,000 tweets.

ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” had 3.4 million uniques, 10.76 million impressions, 73,000 authors, and 105,000 tweets. ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” was at 3.2 million uniques, 10.98 million impressions, 46,400 authors, and 83,900 tweets, and ESPN’s “SEC Stories” posted 2.9 million uniques, 10.2 million impressions, 48,500 authors, and 72,400 tweets .