CALDWELL'S TAKE REPORT: Nielsen unveils new TV Ratings & Twitter Activity metric that confirms 2012 study on Raw & Smackdown
Oct 9, 2013 - 12:42:48 PM
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By James Caldwell, PWTorch assistant editor
On Monday, TV ratings tracking service Nielsen unveiled their new "Nielsen Twitter TV Rating," which will attempt to create a total picture of TV ratings and Twitter activity on top TV shows.
The conclusion, as published by Variety, is there is generally little correlation between TV ratings performance and social media activity.
Last year, I studied and reported on TV ratings and social media activity for all 2012 episodes of WWE Raw and Smackdown to see if there is a correlation between performances.
I came to the same conclusion that, in general, the two metrics did not line up. The times where the metrics did line up were on the extremes - the lowest-rated episodes of the year lined up with the least-socially-active episodes of the year and the highest-rated episodes of the year lined up with the most-socially-active episodes of the year.
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From my 2012 Report published January 3, 2013:
If a show has extremely high social activity, it points to a strong TV rating. Or, if a show has extremely low social activity, it points to a weak TV rating.
In-between, social activity as an indicator of TV ratings performance is very hit or miss. Perhaps that is a contributor to why the Nielsen TV Ratings service plans to institute a Twitter TV Ratings metric in Fall 2013 that will line up traditional TV Ratings with social activity to better gauge how many people are watching and engaged in a particular show.
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To use a broad example, the NFL Super Bowl would fit the high-end extreme - it's the most-watched TV telecast of the year and the most socially-active episode of the year. For WWE, the Raw after WrestleMania is typically the most-watched Raw of the year (although, the post-Royal Rumble episode has come on strong in recent years) and it is typically the most-socially-active episode of the year.
To use a recent example on the low-end, the post-Battleground Raw this week scored the lowest TV rating of the year and it was the least-socially-active Raw of the year for a post-PPV episode.
What Nielsen's new metric combining TV Ratings performance and Twitter Activity hopes to accomplish is fill in the middle ground to give a complete picture of TV viewing through both traditional and new metrics.
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