#QandA dwarfs reality TV show mentions despite huge audience differences
Ten’s I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here is winning the Twitter war against its major rivals, however analysis reveals mentions of the three major reality franchises’ official hashtags were dwarfed by ABC political show Q&A last night.
Whilst the celebrity jungle show saw its audience fall away against its two heavyweight competitors of Seven’s My Kitchen Rules (MKR) and Nine’s The Block Triple Threat last night its viewers were by far the most engaged on Twitter with #Imacelebrityau receiving 3,581 mentions overnight from its 755,000 viewers.
Whilst MKR doubled Celebrity’s audience, with 1.596m overnight metro viewers, its hashtag #MKR2015 was used 7,928 times last night, whilst The Block had just 1,311 mentions on its #theblock handle after pulling 802,000. ABC’s late-night political debate show Q&A had 42,492 mentions on #QandA from 627,000 viewers, according to figures compiled for Mumbrella by social media agency We Are Social.
Overnight ratings data for Monday, February 2. Hashtag tracking via We Are Social
When other hashtags used by fans of the shows are added on all three of the commercial networks increased significantly.
When #MKR, #MKR2015, #countrycousins were included the Seven show managed a total of 9,271 mentions. Similarly when expanded out to include #theblock, #theblock2015, #theblockshop, #roomreveals, #triplethreat, Nine’s renovation show had 1,515 mentions in total.
There was more joy for Channel Ten’s reality reboot of the UK show in the second night of its debut season, which jumped from 3,581 mentions for the #Imacelebrityau hashtag to 48,931 when #Imacelebrityau, #celebchrissie, #celebjoel, #celebmaureen, #celebmerv, #celeblaura are included.
DDB head of social Karalee Evans said the figures were surprising, but added some hashtag confusion through poor social media management may have contributed to the poor performance of the MKR and The Block tags.
Evans
“Shows that have multiple hashtag use from its audience, such as #MKR and #Imacelebrityau, are losing out from a dilution of share of conversation influence. One of the reasons behind the volume winner of #QandA is the clarity of the hashtag, and that everyone uses the same tag to join the Twitter conversation”, she said.
Twitter has been aggressively courting TV networks in the last few years as it seeks to find ways to grow its advertising revenue from new sources. This week the social media giant will unveil Twitter TV ratings in partnership with Nielsen, as well as other initiatives to engage with networks.
The company says its data shows the majority of Twitter conversations about TV shows occur during broadcast, making it a powerful second screen promotional opportunity for networks looking to drive engagement, brand awareness; and increased viewers.
This has seen it pitch TV advertising on Twitter to markets as it tries to sell the value of a its audience to TV networks, with its local arm focusing on commercial television content and a partnerships team actively reaching out to commercial networks.
Network Ten said at its upfront presentation last year it was focusing on social media engagement as one of its key metrics for 2015.
Robert Burton-Bradley
But 45% of all tweets are just Ben Pobjie.
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I’d like to see the stats broken down even further:
– What percentage of those Q&A tweets are by ABC staffers and public servants?
Take them away, and it’s probably neck and neck with the other shows!
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Yes Robbo, ABC staffers and public servants all sat up last night tweeting Q&A because they get free biscuits on Tuesday morning.
Good job using all those verbs and nouns in your comment though!
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wonder how those hashtag numbers correlate to nielsens’ twitter ratings??? https://mumbrella.com.au/nielsen-launches-tv-twitter-ratings-australia-215590
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Hey Robbo keep up with the program. Q&A has had a loyal twitter following for years and funnily enough they don’t seem to be ABC staff. Read this.
http://www.smh.com.au/entertai.....2dtgs.html
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Just can’t understand the value of Twitter tv ratings. Posting on Twitter is not an indication of audience engagement, it’s an indication of the sort of person who watches the show. The idea the audience is more engrossed due to tweet volume is misguided.
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And so what if public servants and ABC staffers tweet? They are citizens too.
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Robbo do you watch QandA or follow the tweets? The viewers go nuts on twitter and I am sure some of them are ABC staffers but I am also certain a hell of a lot of them are not (me included)
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@ Robbo perhaps we should take the phones away from those ABC staffers and public servants and make them all bitter too.
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Just to add some perspective to the Q&A data.
That 627,000 for Q&A means the average minute had 627,000 people viewing. And that is just metro – adding in regional would make it close to one million.
That 42,492 is the gross number of tweets – that equates to an average of 708 per minute. Having said that, it is tweet posts and the numbers of readers would be many orders of magnitude higher.
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Does anyone know any studies looking at the correlation between twitter / social engagement and ratings success (or not?). Would love to know.
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Hi Adam.
I’ve read some articles that indicate the correlation is low. That was primarily because the Twitter data was based around tweets posted rather than tweets read (can’t recall where re-tweets were classified). That is rather than measuring the user universe it was measuring the ‘active’ universe rather than the ‘active+passive’ universe (active = wrote the tweet, passive = read the tweet) – hence the lower correlation with the TV audience (which under that loose definition are ‘passive’ – they are consuming the content rather than creating it).
Give Scott Gillham at Nielsen a call as he may have something more concrete.
Cheers.
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Doesn’t twitter result in many people jumping on- line during the ad-breaks?
I wouldn’t be happy if I was an advertiser, and people were being encouraged to constantly tweet.
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There’s nothing surprising about these figures.
The Q&A concept is about viewer participation both in studio and in social – and in real time. Twitter skews towards a politically active, media literate profile.
The main take out here for brands that want to drive engagement in social would be to create dynamic content that stirs emotions and is personally relevant to the people you want to reach. That’s the fundamental difference between Q&A and canned reality TV.
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Its simple – Q&A is politics and that invites an opinion from everyone regardless of whether they’re watching or not. And debates require more than 140 characters so the majority of that volume is the same group of people in multiple tweets. It’s also an echo chamber and no ones really engaging with anyone’s POV beyond beyond a re- tweet. Replies are few and far between. It’s worse than IRC days.
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@Adam Ferrier
Nielsen published a report in August 2013 that investigated the relationship between tweets and TV tune in. Google “nielsen report tweets impact ratings” and you’ll find it.
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Many tweets by LNP supporters have misspellings and awful punctuation. No wonder the loyal Daily Tele readers can be swung by Murdoch’s comic books. #onetermtony #notmyleader
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Missing the point here, people who watch reality TV are unlikely intelligent enough to engage with technology, but then again with such mindless content… What worthwhile is there to engage with?
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The tweets on Q and A are a waste of time – lots of ideological zealots, be they Labor or Coalition, but mainly Labor, sprouting the party line. Very little wit, total lack of incisiveness, I thought the return on Monday night might prove to be interesting with Abbott so on the nose, but what we got was Wayne Swann and Barnaby Joyce arguing the same old same old back and forth with Tasmanian terror Jackie Lambie providing the odd moment of puerile comic relief. Same as it ever was, boring as it ever was. The show only works when it’s a politician free zone and they find five people of diverse opinions who can talk about more than climate change, stopping the boats and we can balance the books better than you can.
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Makes you think about the future of share measurement…
OzTam/Twitter other social mentions, how do they describe consumption now, and how does that evolve in the future.
Just how relevant will something like OzTam be in the next few years? Does it evolve into something more actual than a rather crude extrapolation?
What does this do then, to the value of advertising, and what does that mean about the investment that is required..
I don’t have a crystal ball – and we haven’t got the whole story yet – but the future will be interesting.
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Good question Rick.
I’ll have a crack at answering it.
As video consumption fragments acrossvarious devices I think we will have a number of data collection methodologies customised to each device.
For example, peoplemeters work well with ‘tethered’ TVs in a household situation.
But we will need to leverage RPD data for subscription services such as Foxtel, Fetch, Netflix and the SVOD services. However, that will only give us streams.
Similarly for catch-up we will need to leverage traffic data for things like iView.
We’ll also need app and browser data from smartphones.
To complement these we will need household panels (as the bulk of TV will remain in a traditional household viewing situation for the foreseeable future. We will need to monitor their TV, PC, laptop and smartphone and segregate broadcast, cable, IP, IDS, SVOD etc services into discrete silos (though we may have to flip this model and look at delivery and then segment by device).
Then having captured or estimated the gross quantum of usage, we will need to have panels of people that allow us to look at the duplication between (say) watching TV on the main screen before work, catching some news on the smartphone on the train on the way to work, seeing the game in the bar at lunchtime, then back to the main TV with the family, then finally some viewing on the tablet before turning in for the day.
The purpose of this panel – though more likely to be clusters of ‘convergence panels’ – will be to de-duplicate device usage so that we only count a person once towards unique audience/reach. Of course they will also allow us to produce longitudinal cumulative audience/reach data as well.
The other important stage will be to put all those metrics on an ‘equal footing’. So how do we equate the ‘average minute audience’ of TV, with streams from catch-up or tweets. The key will probably be ‘time spent’ – with minutes being the common denominator.
Apart from doing it … I can’t really see any problems.
Cheers.
We will also
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Does this factor in that I’m a Celeb uses Twitter hashtags as one of their voting methods?
http://tenplay.com.au/channel-.....conditions
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The black’s official hashtag is #TheBlock9 so that’d explain why it’s numbers were so low – they didn’t measure the right one.
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Hi Anthony,
The Block’s official Twitter account is @theblock9, but the hashtag is simply #theblock.
Cheers,
Alex – editor, Mumbrella