Twitter’s Robin Sloan told an audience at a conference this week that Twitter brings a real-time social layer to watching television, which in part, can help bring back the shared experience of watching entertainment TV shows as they air.
“[In the last 18 months], I think we actually saw the pendulum swing back toward things like shared experiences, back toward live TV,” Sloan said. “I think Twitter, of course, is one of the things that drove this,” he said.” But Sloan says it works best on shows with unexpected outcomes, like Dancing with the Stars and MTV’s VMA awards.
He gave several examples, from “synchronous show tweeting” (people who work for a show sending out behind-the-scenes tweets as it airs) to social viewing (viewers sharing stuff during a show, often with hashtags) and user involvement (tweets end up on the air or influence programming in some way).
So does it lead to higher ratings? Sloan mentioned Oxygen Media’s success with cultivating “social viewing parties” — on the East Coast, the idea first debuted, ratings jumped 92%. On the West Coast, which at the time didn’t throw any of the social parties, ratings grew 14%. “On the Twitter media team, we believe that tweets drive TV tune-in,” Sloan said.
