They say the new watercooler is in the cloud, as live TV and social media find each other mutually beneficial partners for fostering consumer interest in both. And with Twitter dominating online conversations since this concept grew up out of fertile second-screen soil, other social media companies are looking for ways to cut in on some of the social TV action.
Facebook, this week, announced that it will begin sending analytics to the big four broadcast networks - ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS - in addition to a few other partners, in an effort to woo television networks into using Facebook as a hub for fans of their TV shows.
Facebook, according to the Wall Street Journal, will not make their analytic data available to the public, but the company has much to share with the select TV networks, including how many "likes", comments, and shares that a given TV episode roused on the world's largest social network.
One limited example of a Facebook TV analytics report is that a recent episode of "Dancing With the Stars" generated more than 1 million interactions from three quarters of a million people. Facebook figures out how many "interactions" occur for a given show by creating a list of keywords, tracking those keywords, and eliminating cross-chatter from other topics that aren't related to the episode or TV show.
Facebook Inc. will also tally the number of private posts shared between friends, but says it will collect that information anonymously only, in effect, to add to the total count. The social media giant wants to eventually include analytics over periods of time - a kind of new Nielsen rating system based on its own social network.
Speaking of Nielson, Twitter and Nielson have already teamed up to provide a "Nielsen Twitter TV Rating" to measure real-time social activity to track how much buzz a certain show is getting on Twitter. The microblogging site, which is due for an IPO very soon, has been providing analytics to businesses for free since June.
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