Twitter’s Social TV Ratings Will Launch In The UK This Month

Twitter’s efforts to link television viewing with activity on its network took a step forward today when Kantar Media announced it will launch Twitter TV audience engagement ratings in the United Kingdom.

Modeled after the Nielsen Twitter TV ratings in the United States, the new service will put more data behind Twitter’s contention that people who are active on Twitter while watching television amplify the impact of programming, advertising and brands associated with shows.

Kantar and Twitter announced a partnership a year ago to provide TV ratings for the UK and Spain. In March, they announced an expansion to the Nordics, Russia, parts of Africa and southeast Asia, but have only launched in the UK. Twitter is working with Nielsen to offer similar services in Italy and Australia, with Video Research in Japan and GFK in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.

The Kantar Twitter TV Ratings will include these metrics:

• Unique authors (people tweeting) and their affinity to brands, channels and programs
• Unique audience: measuring the number of individuals who viewed tweets related to individual programs
• Impressions: the total number of times that a tweet or retweet has been seen about a particular program
• Number of tweets and retweets about a program before, during and after the broadcast.
• Average tweets per minute and the highest volume of tweets per minute related to the program.

“TV viewing has changed forever with the advent of the second screen,” Kantar Media’s global CEO Andy Brown said at an industry launch event in London, reported by The Drum. “It has undoubtedly changed the way we watch TV. In the UK, we are blessed with one of the best TV measurement services in the world, BARB (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board), but even BARB isn’t going to be able to measure everything we want to.

“We see this as being absolutely complementary to BARB and running alongside it. It’s a manifestation of a bigger relationship that we have with Twitter.”

Last week Kantar Media released a study measuring Twitter impact on UK television. Among the more interesting findings:

• 40% of UK Twitter activity is about television during peak viewing hours.
• Twitter TV activity correlates with audience size on a broad level (shows with high Twitter activity tend to have larger audiences, but some highly watched shows aren’t surrounded by big Twitter activity.
• 11% of broadcasts experienced an increase in Tweets followed by an increase in viewing levels and those with a positive effect from Twitter to TV, got a 2% boost in audience.

Since the data nuanced — talent shows, reality shows, documentaries and certain dramas, especially with younger skewing or cultish demographics, showed higher Twitter activity — Kantar makes the case that companies need a sophisticated tool to act smartly. From the study:

[blockquote]High quality analysis of Twitter data is essential. Simply counting hashtags will limit understanding, so contextual approaches like those from Kantar Media will be important in terms of seeing the full conversation whilst avoiding false positives.[/blockquote]

The UK ratings are expected to be available by mid-October. At the same time, Kantar Media will launch a dashboard, Instar Social, for broadcasters, media agencies and advertisers that will include a live, real-time leaderboard.