Nielsen, Facebook Team Up to Measure TV Social Media Impact

As part of its new multi-platform evaluation system, the ratings tracker will now include Facebook in its social media metrics.

Nielsen won’t peek into private Facebook messages, but it will have access to all public posts. “Nielsen Social measurement is evolving to provide a comprehensive, standardised picture of how consumers are responding to program content through social media, wherever and whenever”.

The expanded ratings are due to launch commercially in the first half of 2016 and will be available in Italy, Mexico, the USA and Australia – all the markets where Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings are now available. It will include social media authorship – posts and tweets;, engagement, such as comments, likes, replies, retweets, shares; reach, audience and impressions; and demographics (age and gender) as available.

Nielsen is also enhancing its monitoring of social-media content about TV shows. The move is a big one considering Nielsen hasn’t added a social platform to its evaluation methods since it began tracking Twitter TV ratings almost three years ago.

By measuring program-related conversation across social networking services, TV networks and streaming content providers can assess the effectiveness of social audience engagement strategies and better understand the relationship between social activity and tune-in. Currently, the top SVOD services hold their audience stats close to the vest; while Netflix routinely reports the total number of subscribers to its service, it does not release data about what those subscribers watch, for how long, where they browse to after a program ends, and so on. “As more and more of our TV partners explore new and creative ways to engage with fans during and after the broadcast, it’s critical that they are able to measure and analyze their efforts”, wrote Facebook media partnerships director Nick Grudin in a blog post.

Nielsen (NYSE:NLSN) isn’t just watching what people say about television shows on Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) anymore. Nielsen, an S&P 500 company, has operations in over 100 countries that cover more than 90% of the world’s population.