Nielsen Launches Twitter TV Ratings, Potentially A Key Social Metric For Advertisers

Almost a year in the making, Nielsen has finally rolled out its Twitter TV Ratings service, a weekly look at which US television shows have the biggest audience on Twitter.

The ratings chart aims to track an overall audience for each show, based on the total number of tweets, how many unique accounts tweet about a show and how often those tweets are seen.

It’s seen as a potentially key metric for brands and advertisers as they try to gauge the value of the social conversation surrounding the networks, shows and actors/actresses that they associate with through TV ad buys. And with its IPO approaching, Twitter hopes it also convinces brands to buy more social ads on its platform — Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts and the like — to tap into those conversations.

The Twitter TV Ratings are being published weekly on SocialGuide.com — the social TV metrics company that Nielsen bought late last year. It appears that the ratings will be updated every Monday. The chart below is hot off the presses, as they say, with ABC’s Scandal last week’s top show.

There’s an interesting article on Variety this morning that’s also worth reading. It uses a week-old TV ratings chart, but makes the point that popular shows on Twitter are different from overall TV ratings that Nielsen reports.