Measuring the Social TV experience

In this week’s egta bite we look at a Dutch initiative that aims, through an analysis of Twitter feeds, to identify and quantify the emotions most commonly triggered by a given programme among viewers who watch television whilst engaging in a social media activity.

The concept

The impact of Twitter on television in the Netherlands is now measurable through a monthly overview of programs that generate the most tweets. This list is being published by SPOT (the national Dutch TV trade body) together with Remotely.tv (an online social platform) under the name Social TV Ratings. Data are compiled by Remotely.tv 24 hours a day, seven days a week using 1.3 million registered Dutch Twitter accounts that are included in their database. Tweets are then filtered on TV-related terms making sure they are associated with the correct programme (filters are based on data such as station name, presenters, guests, actors and program titles plus general terms used while watching TV). The measurement starts three hours before each programme and ends one hour after it finishes. The number of tweets occurring outside this timeframe is very low, and the reliability of the measurement would therefore decrease if they were to be taken into account. The measurement includes 19 Dutch TV channels. To obtain a greater diversity of programmes, a given show may occur only once in the rankings. In case of series, the episode that is most tweeted about is included in the report. The male/female ratio is also calculated based on account data retrieved from Twitter and using algorithms that can be used in a large majority of the accounts to assign to a gender. This database is then organised in several ranking categories:

1. Top 25 Tweets total 2. Top 25 Tweets women 3. Top 25 Tweets men 4. Top 25 Twitter users total 5. Tweets per day 6. Tweets per channel 7. Tweet Cloud

The monthly Social TV Ratings are published online on the website of SPOT http://www.spot.nl/publicaties/social-tv-ratings at the end of each month.

Why does it matter to egta members?

This creative idea proves once again that TV and social media are more than ever connected, bringing the Social TV experience to TV viewers. Viewers are even more involved in the broadcast, giving immediate feedback. Measuring this feedback and reactions gives valuable and very useful insights on a given programme’s popularity, allowing TV stations to use this additional data as another research tool to base their programming on. In addition, this case shows how social media and TV can reinforce each other mutually.