SocialGuide, which is a Nielsen and McKinsey lovechild, logs all Twitter activity about US television programming. It has just released a report saying…
“We saw a statistically significant causal influence indicating that a spike in TV ratings can increase the volume of tweets, and, conversely, a spike in tweets can increase tune-in,” said Nielsen’s chief research officer Paul Donato, in a statement.
Intuitively it makes sense that heightened Twitter activity causes people to change channels. If you see tweets about remarkable athletic prowess being demonstrated in a basketball game or hilarious insults being traded in a presidential debate and you’re already sitting on the couch flipping channels, it follows that you’re likelier to check out the source.
But there are abundant high-profile examples of broadcasts whose ratings didn’t live up to the massive chatter they drove on Twitter. Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Lance Armstrong and MTV’s Video Music Awards last fall are among them. And the first airing of “Sharknado” had underwhelming ratings compared to previous SyFy titles, despite its massive Twitter explosion (though the second and third airings did substantially better).
Born Curious 
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