Doesn’t play well with others. Questionable future. No, we’re not talking about a troubled youth — we’re talking about Twitter, at least in the eyes of social media skeptics. And at times, the skeptics have valid points. Twitter has struggled to grow its user base while Facebook seems as if it will never plateau. Furthermore new research has found there to be little correlation between social media and direct sales, with the research firm likening marketing via social media with selling at weekly church services just because it happens that’s where people are congregated.
As Brenna Ehrlich discusses in a new article for Mashable, Twitter is adopting a new tactic in its battle to assert legitimacy with marketers – drawing a parallel between their service and surges in TV ratings. At first glance, the data supports the argument. Ehrlich cites last year’s Super Bowl which set records for viewership and Tweets-per-second as evidence for Twitter’s positive impact on television ratings. Similarly, Ehrlich suggests that social integration was a key contributing factor in the 35 percent ratings boost enjoyed by this year’s Grammy Awards.
Savvy marketers know, however, that correlation does not equal causation. Does Twitter impact TV ratings, or does TV’s willingness to integrate social media into its programming buoy Twitter? In the absence of causal linkage, it’s difficult to establish whether Twitter and TV are the proverbial chicken or egg, much less which came first.
What say you? Is there a causal relationship between Twitter on television ratings?
TweetTags: Social Media, television, tv, tv ratings, twitter
This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Digital Marketing, Social Media, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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