The first edition of Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings, published Tuesday, revealed the ABC thriller Scandal was the most tweeted about show of the week.
Tweets about Scandal reached 3.7 million people and more than 178,500 people sent at least one tweet about the show, beating out the 90,000 people who tweeted about MTV’s Miley Cyrus documentary, Miley: The Movement.
This week’s episode of Saturday Night Live, which was not-coincidentally also hosted by Cyrus, took the number three spot, reaching an audience of 3.1 million people.
The Voice, The Vampire Diaries, Glee, The X Factor and Dancing with the Stars also landed spots on the top 10 list, which measures prime time (excluding sports). The ratings, announced as a joint partnership late last year, measure unique authors of tweets, unique audience viewing tweets, total impressions and total number of tweets sent.
The numbers for unique authors and tweets are measured using data from three hours before and after the broadcast of a program while the unique audience and impressions include tweets sent until the end of the broadcast day at 5 a.m.
The Nielsen Twitter ratings are part of Twitter’s ongoing effort to link ad spend on Twitter to campaigns on TV. The social network has also created a dashboard that allows advertisers to synch their Twitter campaigns to their TV campaigns and target consumers who have already seen their commercial on broadcast.
Nielsen and McKinsey’s social TV arm, SocialGuide, released another study Tuesday that addresses that common complaint from marketers that social media distracts consumers from broadcast ads. The report showed 70% of tweets were sent during program time, not a commercial break.
