What Twitter can do for TV

What Twitter can do for TV

By Steve Clarke,
Wednesday, 23rd July 2014
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Twitter is stoking the conversations around TV shows. But can it also drive ratings?

As viewer behaviour gets more difficult to predict, broadcasters and producers are increasingly looking at Twitter to enhance viewer engagement. In some quarters, there is a belief that Twitter can cause more people to tune in.

A packed RTS early-evening event, “TV ReTweeted”, reported from the front line of broadcasting and social media.

Dan Biddle
Dan Biddle, Broadcast Partnerships, Twitter UK (Credit: Paul Hampartsoumian)

With Twitter claiming more than 15 million active users in the UK, the night’s chair, journalist Kate Bulkley, quoted research suggesting that 40% of Tweeting during primetime is TV-related.

TV types routinely use the ubiquitous social network to gauge how their shows are faring live on air. They also deploy Twitter to encourage viewers to interact with shows and to discover upcoming shows.

The big question, however, is who occupies the driving seat – Twitter or the TV networks? In other words, does Twitter need TV more than the box needs the social network? 

Before the panel discussion got underway, Dan Biddle, Head of Broadcast Partnerships at Twitter UK, gave a 20-minute presentation on what Twitter can do for TV.

He set out to demonstrate how, for certain kinds of programmes (almost invariably entertainment juggernauts such as The Voice UK), Twitter not only adds to the viewing experience but in at least one case – MTV UK’s Hottest Summer Superstar vote last year  – actually drove audiences to a specific TV promotion and channel portfolio. 

Biddle, formerly BBC Vision’s Social Media Executive, claimed that TV and Twitter share certain similarities.

“Twitter is very much about that rhythm and pulse that already exists in TV,” he said. “It’s about making the most of your audience; Twitter gives you the ability to understand your audience and then respond to it and programme accordingly…

“Beforehand, it’s about teasers, preview clips, getting the talent talking early about the show;… and then, during, it’s about sharing the moment, live games, getting people polling; and afterwards, driving them to video-on-demand.”

On-screen hashtags are becoming ubiquitous as Twitter establishes itself more and more as “the campfire around which everyone is telling stories”.

Twitter is powered by conversations and TV sparks conversations, especially around big events such as live sports and entertainment shows, but also pre-recorded campaigns such as Channel 4’s Fish Fight.

“The grammar of TV and Twitter are very similar,” said Biddle. “But there are certain things that TV shows need to do to work with the Twitter audience.”

One of these is to incentivise users to create a buzz on social media about upcoming content.

In the run-up to the screening of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary special, The Day of The Doctor, last autumn, audiences were offered a carrot to tweet #SaveTheDay. The prize: extra content that could only be unlocked once a certain number of tweets was recorded. 

Communicating directly with talent (many of whom are Twitter addicts) is a way of cementing audience engagement. Biddle recounted what happened during this year’s live finals of The Voice UK, when will.i.am summoned up a Twitterstorm by appearing on the show wearing several pairs of glasses.

“The best thing that Twitter brings to TV is audience engagement” 

His initial tweet, in which he asked viewers to choose the pair he should wear on the show, was retweeted 8,000 times. 

When the star carried on live tweeting during the programme – “He knows he’s got a campfire of his own that he can start throwing more logs on,” observed Biddle – the figures started to grow. 

“He called it #glassface and from there it just took off,” recalled Biddle. “They were all in front of the TV, they were with the show and it was part of the show. There were 10,000 tweets around #glassface.”

Did it lead to a ratings spike? Biddle wasn’t saying. But he did add: “It might only be a [small] percentage of your audience that are tweeting about your show, but there’s a large percentage who are seeing those tweets.”

In terms of Twitter driving audiences to TV, MTV UK’s Hottest Summer Superstar was an outright win-win for both social network and TV station.

In the course of five weeks last summer 166 million tweets were sent as young people voted for the season’s hottest pop act.

One Direction pipped Justin Bieber in the contest; more importantly, audiences to the flagship UK MTV Music channel surged by 55%, according to MTV’s Virginia Monaghan, VP for Music Content and Commissioning.

“We found a perfect integration between online, Twitter and TV,” she said at the RTS event. “And it was the simplicity – such a simple hashtag, #MTVhottest. People love that; there is no point in trying to overcomplicate things.”

Monaghan said that, across MTV’s network of UK music channels, ratings rose by 22% over the five weeks: “Twitter obviously helped in pushing those social-media fans back into watching the channels.”

MTV’s Hottest began life as a UK vote, but went global as the social-media crowd jumped on board.

The evening’s next speaker, Channel 4’s Head of Advertising Research & Development, Martin Greenbank, expressed some scepticism about Twitter’s ability to boost ratings.

He said: “Channel 4 has always been interested in how it reacts to social media. Its audience are young and fairly tech-savvy. It’s a bit like MTV in terms of its attraction to that kind of technology.

“Our approach has been very experimental – with hashtags [we] have made a lot of mistakes as well as a lot of sensible decisions… Because social media is so new I don’t think there is a set of rules that you can apply to everything you do…

“For producers, it’s very much a case of: you’ve got to start testing and trialling. There’s no point in hoping that what worked last year will work today.”

But do tweets drive viewing, probed Bulkley? 

“There’s a dual effect at play,” replied Greenbank. “I am not taking away anything from MTV’s Hottest – it is interesting because it drives viewers directly back to a programme and to a channel.

“But for a lot of hashtags, you can’t necessarily say that the hashtag has driven people back to viewing.

“In the commercial world I don’t think anyone would suggest that, from an advertising point of view, having a hashtag leads to selling more product. They don’t think the scale is quite there to do that.”

Greenbank added: “The best Twitter examples out there about TV-related tweets are not just things like #glassface, rather it’s what the audience decides should be the hashtag associated with the content.”

A recent edition of Made In Chelsea provided an illustration: one of the show’s characters, Mark-Francis Vandelli, put his posh foot in it when he said he’d never heard of Nando’s. As far as he was concerned, it was a wine bar. The gaff immediately trended on Twitter.

“The best thing that Twitter brings to TV is audience engagement,” concluded Greenbank.

For the final part of the discussion, two shows that had used Twitter to help define their characteristics were put under the spotlight.

First up was the Channel 4 panel show, Was It Something I Said?, in which viewers are invited to play along via Twitter. 

Dan Jones, Creative Director, Digital at the show’s producer, Maverick, outlined how the programme grew from an online commission, Quotables

The original idea involved getting people at home to participate in the game. 

“We didn’t think they would want to play along to the extent of downloading an app such as The Million Pound Drop,” said Jones. “Twitter was the lowest-barrier entry point.”

Viewers were directed to the show’s Twitter account (@somethingIsaid) by host David Mitchell. They were then encouraged to answer questions at the same time as these were put to the TV panellists.

The more answers a viewer gave, the more extra bonus content was unlocked – including behind-the-scenes clips and deleted scenes, plus funny pictures and bonus facts and jokes from the show’s contestants. 

As for the fundamental question of Twitter’s ability to boost audience levels, Jones said it happens occasionally in TV – but only when the talent has secured a big Twitter following. 

Panellists“In terms of us, rather than the audience, trying to create a buzz around a show, only once or twice has it affected ratings,” he said. “That’s when the Twitter reach of the talent is 10 million and we’ve been able to take the Channel 4 audience from 1.5 million to 2 million.”

Ross Noble Freewheeling, commissioned and shown by Dave, is a travel show in which the comedian uses Twitter as his guide. 

Iain Coyle, commissioning editor, entertainment, UK TV, said: “If you’ve ever seen Ross Noble live, he has no act. He literally goes into an audience and starts talking and spirals out of control. Everything he does is improvised. The show is an extension of that.

“Probably no other broadcaster would have taken the gamble on it because there are no rules. He puts a tweet out that says: ‘Where shall I go today?’ And he goes off and films it.

“It is the most honest programme you could ever make… It’s thrown all the rules of television out of the window.”

As social-media usage evolves, Twitter’s relationship with TV is bound to change. The jury is out on the precise correlation between Twitter and audience size, but there is no doubt that Twitter is helping to foster the national conversation about TV. 

The early-evening event, ‘TV ReTweeted’, was held at The Hospital Club in central London on 27 May. The producers were Kate Bulkley and Dan Jones.

 

Question & answer

At what point is a hashtag you’re trying to engage the audience with too long? Has Twitter done any research on that?

Dan Biddle: I don’t think there’s too long a hashtag. It depends on what you’re trying to get from the audience.

Strictly’s #scd just sort of emerged, but with most other shows you’ll see that people tend to go with the natural length of the show. Unless you prescribe it on the show by putting up the hashtag and say it’s #benefitstreet rather than #benefitsstreet…

What’s vital is that the hashtag does what it says on the tin. If you obfuscate the hashtag with something… With Release the Hounds (ITV2’s horror game show), they were going to go with #RTH – but if that trends, what does it mean?

I want to know what #releasethe-­hounds means. What is this show where they are releasing dogs on people? Unless something abbreviates into something easily pronounceable, put the whole title up.

 

 Does talent drive Twitter?

 Iain Coyle: Talent intuitively know the power of Twitter. They can harness the people who really like them and talk directly to them.

Dave Gorman (star of Dave’s Modern Life Is Goodish) is relentless on Twitter and finds it a really useful way to talk to his audience.

He tweets during the show. And he will reply to every single tweet. He will stay up until 4:00am or 5:00am answering every last tweet.

He realises the power of that and the loyalty it engenders.