‘Twitter TV Ratings’ is a brand new metric for social TV published recently by Nielsen Holdings, an American global information and measurement company. It measures not only the number of people tweeting about TV programs, but also people viewing those tweets. I believe this kind of development in technology offers valuable information to many stakeholders.

For example, Broadcasters benefit from this as Twitter can act as free advertising for them. It is as if they are implementing viral marketing. Viral marketing is a type of marketing is similar to word-of-mouth marketing, whereby it spreads the message about the existence of the product (TV series’ in this case).  The audience reading the tweets is revealed to be about 50 times more than the ones tweeting; hence, Twitter also increases the customer base. Also, as word-of-mouth is a type of below the line promotion, broadcasters also save a lot of advertising costs.

I am sure this is only the beginning, where there will be more to come on the improvements in technology and social media to bring the world closer and closer as time passes by.

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-07/twitter-impressionism-tv-gets-a-new-metric