Twitter claims to be better than Facebook as TV’s ‘soundtrack’

CANNES — Twitter’s Chief Media Scientist Deb Roy has staked the social network’s claim to be a better partner to broadcasters, television producers and advertisers than rival Facebook.

“The biggest, most pervasive medium ever invented — television — is being intertwined with a global social medium, Twitter,” he said. “Twitter makes TV better: It is, in fact, a force multiplier that can enhance the impact and possibilities of TV.”

Mr Roy was speaking at the MIPTVtelevision-industry conference in Cannes in a presentation focusing on data visualisations to show how chatter about TV shows and ads spreads on Twitter.

“It’s live, public and conversational. We use it in the moment to talk to everyone who cares to listen. We use it to converse; to exchange words,” he said. “(It is) a synchronised social soundtrack for whatever is happening at the moment as a shared experience.”

Mr Roy claimed that the growing number of TV viewers who are simultaneously using Twitter on their smartphones or tablets are not necessarily distracted from shows. The “social soundtrack” argument compares Twitter buzz with the impact actual soundtracks had on films after the silent era.

“It’s hard to imagine today what E.T. would have been like without the soundtrack,” said Mr Roy. “Jaws, without the soundtrack, would be a silly robotic fish splashing in the water!”

He gave examples of TV shows and events that had sparked conversation on Twitter, including this year’s Oscars, when more than five million people sent 19 million tweets that were seen by 37 million people.

“If you count over a 48-hour window, the number of tweet impressions delivered in that extended window exceeds three billion,” said Mr Roy. “The scale is obviously significant.”

Twitter is working with research firms such as Nielsen to pursue a twin strategy of wooing broadcasters with data showing that Twitter buzz around a show can persuade more people to tune in, while convincing brands that, if they advertise around “highly social” shows, they will get a better return on their investment.

“A couple of hundred million dollars spent on TV advertising, by paying attention to where the social signal is from, actually has bottom-line effects,” said Mr Roy. “No matter how you slice it, the complementary activity of having Twitter active with TV seems to be leading to positive outcomes from advertisers’ point of view.”

The challenge for the TV industry is that Facebook has also been making concerted bids to pitch its merits as a social TV platform. While both social media sites share some features — such as hashtags, which Facebook adopted last year after seeing their appeal on Twitter — their efforts to provide data to broadcasters and brands are isolated from each other: Twitter-only ratings charts, for example.

Most TV firms will probably want to use data from both Twitter and Facebook, but Mr Roy’s unflattering comparison of Twitter’s public chatter with the conversation on “your private social network” — a clear reference to Facebook — suggests the competition will continue.

Twitter has acquired social TV analytics start-ups, such as Trendrr, some of which have been trying to help the TV industry make sense of data from Twitter and Facebook. THE GUARDIAN