Kantar Readies for Twitter TV Ratings Roll-Out

Kantar Media says it will launch the UK's first official metric for measuring Twitter TV audience engagement in mid-October.

The two firms announced plans to develop a suite of planning and analytics tools based around 'social TV' last August, with the UK the first market covered. This partnership involved combining Twitter's data on social media chat relating to TV with Kantar's audience research expertise, for use by UK broadcasters, media agencies and the wider television industry.

Kantar Twitter TV Ratings will include new metrics such as unique authors and their affinity to brands, channels and programmes; the number of individuals who viewed tweets relating to individual programmes/shows; and the total number of times that a tweet or retweet about a particular programme has been seen. The service will also include existing metrics including number of tweets and retweets about a programme before, during and after transmission; average tweets per minute; and highest volume of tweets per minute ascribed to that programme.

In addition, Kantar Media has developed a dashboard called Instar Social that can be used to view and analyse data alongside existing TV analysis tools. This will feature a live, real-time leaderboard, providing a snapshot of the top tweeted programmes as they happen.

Andy Brown, Global CEO and Chairman of Kantar Media, comments: 'Using the Kantar Twitter TV Ratings; broadcasters, planners and advertisers will be able to assess programmes and series, plan programme promotions more effectively and assist media buyers and sellers to integrate social data more comprehensively into the TV component of their media mix.'

Web sites: www.twitter.com and www.kantarmedia.com .