Twitter And Nielsen Ratings Team Up

Nielsen Ratings are still considered a crucial television ratings tool for advertisers, yet the program still relies on antiquated sampling numbers to produce its results. Twitter on the other hand is heavily semantic, providing second-by-second updates to its users. Now the two company’s have announced a new TV rating partnership that will benefit both consumers and advertisers.

Known as the “Nielsen Twitter TV Rating” the partnership is meant to measure the social conversations about TV shows. Twitter will essentially target its massive number of users to determine which shows are receiving engaged users and which shows are not real big discussion generators.

More than 140 million active Twitter users generate more than one billion tweets every two and a half days, the Twitter partnership will leverage ALL of those tweets to determine viewer interaction.

In a press release Peter Rice, Chairman and CEO, Fox Networks Group, said:

“Combining the instant feedback of Twitter with Nielsen ratings will benefit us, program producers, and our advertising partners.”

The new partnership will not remove Nielsen’s TV ratings from the equation, instead it will be used as a secondary measurement tool to determine which shows are upcoming, beginning to wane among audiences, etc.

Nielsen Research will also continue to use its NM Incite SocialGuide audience engagement tool to measure social metrics across multiple network platforms.

As Twitter continues to grow its user base, announcing 200 million accounts as of Tuesday, Nielsen can expect better results. I suspect the initial system will offer decent results that will only increase in importance as the system is tweaked.

Facebook has been partnered with Nielsen Ratings since 2011, however the scope of this new partnership seems to be more robust.

Do you think offering social engagement metrics is a better way to rate television shows than simple by the numbers demographics?

[Image via interactive-advertising-agency]