Twitter creates “social viewing” that affects TV programs’ ratings

Twitter is bringing a new social and community element to television, according to the company officials. Twitter says its service makes "community viewing" possible now-no assembly required. According to the new stats 60% of people routinely watch the tube while also surfing the web on their laptop. On the other hand, Nielsen figures also show that tweet traffic on the East Coast spikes every time an episode of Dancing with the Stars came on TV. Twitter's Robin Sloan says this phenomenon can work two ways: The airing of a popular show can spark waves of tweets, but the viewership of those shows also seems to increase as more and more people tweet about it.

Sloan notes that some shows are more "tweetable" than others. To be tweet-worthy on a large scale, the show needs to have "liveliness, uncertain outcome, and a wide national audience.

Sloan identifies three main modes of social viewing with Twitter.

1. Synchronous show tweeting, in which individual tweeters provide running commentary MST3000-style to their followers on Twitter.

2. Social Viewing, in which a community of Twitter users' tweets are displayed together (grouped by hash tag) so that a running group-conversation is created.

3. User involvement, in which the tweets actually become content in the show. Sloan says MTV is far and away the master of this model. He points to MTV's programming around its TwitterTracker site, which tracks how many people are tweeting in confidential votes for Video Music Awards contenders such as Kanye West, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift.