“Don’t think of @Twitter as a #social or #broadcast #network. It’s a combination of the two.”
Twitter's Deb Roy
CMDC Canada tweeted that quotation from keynote speaker Deb Roy, Twitter’s chief media scientist, during the organization’s 2014 conference Tuesday in Toronto.
Throughout his talk, Roy addressed the ways in which audiences have been taking to Twitter to have conversations and share opinions about live TV (something he knows a thing or two about, given that he co-founded social TV analytics company Bluefin Labs, which was acquired by Twitter last year).
Roy acknowledged that programming and advertising executives—the people who invest in “first screen” experiences—have concerns about whether viewers will be distracted by second screens, but stressed that Twitter produces a synchronized “social soundtrack” to all of the things happening on live TV.
Reflecting on this year’s Oscar broadcast, for example, he delivered a rapid-fire list of statistics. Roy said 19 million tweets were generated by more than five million people, and those tweets were in turn viewed by 37 million people. Within only 48 hours, those 19 million tweets were seen 3.3 billion times globally.
Still, many have doubts about whether Twitter can drive TV tune-in. Roy shared an anecdote about a news program in Japan during which an anchor said they were about to disclose some interesting news about a well-known celebrity. The tease was also tweeted, and Roy said the TV audience doubled within minutes. (The big news, by the way, was that the celebrity was pregnant.) Twitter can be used as a channel “to build anticipation about a moment,” he said.
He then switched from anecdotes to hard numbers to show how talk on Twitter can help with TV ratings. Nielsen research from the U.S., he said, shows that “the volume of tweets caused statistically significant changes in live TV ratings among 29% of the episodes.”
He added that if a TV ad runs during a show that has a lot of Twitter activity, Nielsen research shows there’s a 7% lift in product sales “simply from being where the conversation is.”
Roy also spoke of how marketers can use Twitter as a platform to complement what they’re doing on TV. To that end, Twitter has just released a TV conversation targeting tool for advertisers in Canada. For example, if people watching Glee are tweeting about it, the tool can track those that saw a 30-second TV spot for Volkswagen during the broadcast, and then Volkswagen can send promoted tweets to those people.
Roy also made what was likely the first – and only – reference media directors will ever hear at a conference to Herman Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist born in 1850 who famously discovered the “forgetting curve.” Roy showed a graph that plotted memory retention versus elapsed time to show just how quickly people forget information. Ebbinghaus found that in the first 24 hours after learning something new, a person will forget more than 60% of it.
The takeaway from Roy? “If you’re trying to create a conversation around a live experience, you better move fast.”
