-
What Nielsen's 'Social Content Ratings' Means For Radio
January 26, 2016
-
You may have read last week that Nielsen is expanding their current "Twitter TV Ratings" to include Facebook and Instagram buzz, too.
Nielsen's "Twitter TV Ratings" was unveiled in 2013 as propriety, first-ever syndicated metrics focused on the amount of exchange that TV shows generate on Twitter.
The ratings track amount of tweets around an event/program, number of unique authors (that's the same as the cume number programmers look at), reach and impressions based on activity three hours before an event/program airs to three hours after.
For a visual of what this rating system looked like, I've outlined the recent Democratic Debate below.
What Nielsen Social captured around the debate was 247,000 unique people tweeting, creating an estimated reach of 6.5 million.
If you're being strategic in the social space, this type of rating allows us to gauge what matters to the chatty portion of our fan base.
No more guessing.
I can study these ratings and show our Corporate Programmers at Cumulus and Westwood One what their audience was doing the night before. And from that, over time, forecast what folks are likely going to be doing when they may not be listening to us.
And that's what we want to know, right?
What the audience is doing when they're not listening. Social is opportunity to weave our personality into moments that matter to the audience.
And Sean Casey, President of Nielsen Social, said it best when I asked about Nielsen expanding its social ratings:
"Understanding the relationship between social media and consumer behavior is of utmost interest."
Casey then shared a couple of examples of what radio can take away from what Nielsen has learned so far:
"We have completed several studies that help our clients understand the relationship between social media and TV viewing. For example we did a study that showed that increasing the social impressions (the number of times people see social content related to a program) by 10% corresponded to a 1.8% increase in the +7 time-shifted audience; indicating that social is playing a role in driving viewers to watch a program later in the week.
In a separate study we also found that social media can be used to better predict the TV audience size for their premiere episode. Now with Facebook and Instagram coming into our measurement, to complement the Twitter measurement we already have in place, we look forward to analyzing a deeper social signal to better understand the role social media plays in relationship to consumer behavior.
We are excited about how these insights have the potential to be applied by the television industry, as well as to other media, such as radio and print."
So while 'Social Content Ratings' may not directly apply to radio right now, the key here is to recognize metrics are evolving.
Nielsen Social has formulated a way to show over all Twitter, Facebook and Instagram activity to help networks and advertisers come up with ways to better use the platforms to drive awareness.
Not necessarily "create ratings." It can't be.
Social media is not a magic wand. It doesn't produce ratings for you.
What creates ratings is mass appeal content with already high anticipation.
But once we have the content right - there's no doubt the social space can be our greatest asset for elevating awareness and tune in for our brand.
Your competency may be solely based on what PPM or Diary ratings report. However, we're operating in a time where a brand is so much more than just traditional ratings.
What are you doing every day to build an active social fan base?
We're not entitled to one.
We may have earned listener loyalty to turn the radio on each day - but holding their attention in the social space is different.
Nielsen's activity with Twitter and now Facebook and Instagram for T.V. foretells an interesting future for those of us in radio.
Now is the time to get busy with that social fan base.
Reach out to me anytime on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter.
Please enjoy MERGE archives here.