As programmers pay more attention to their social TV
strategies, a new internal study from GetGlue has highlighted some important
differences in the way people use social media for different genres of TV
programming.
While Twitter remains an extremely popular social media
platform for sports, news and reality TV, the GetGlue analysis shows that its
usage frequently outpaces Twitter for scripted dramas and sitcoms and that its
usage is growing much faster than Twitter, reports Jesse Burros, director of
business operations.
"We see significant spikes in social TV during major
events," like the NBA Finals, where Twitter usage skyrockets, he noted in a
briefing.
But this overall usage tends to hide very different usage
patterns among different genres of programming, he added. When GetGlue dug into
the data it found that "scripted TV performs very differently compared to
sports, news and reality," he noted. "In the majority [of popular scripted
shows] GetGlue outperforms Twitter."
Four of the top 10 highest rated scripted broadcast TV shows
in April and May 2012 had more social TV activity on GetGlue than Twitter, and
GetGlue outperformed Twitter on nine of the 10 highest-rated cable shows during
summer 2012.
Burros also noted that in the scripted programming area,
GetGlue usage was also growing much more rapidly than Twitter.
For example, GetGlue usage around Castle was 1.7 times than of Twitter and Modern Family was 1.4 times higher than Twitter. GetGlue usage for Castle grew by 2,300% from April-May
2011 and by 1,600% for Modern Family
over a year earlier. In contrast, Twitter's growth was 104% and 174% for the
two highest-rated broadcast scripted shows in that period.
GetGlue also seems to be responsible for a significant
amount of the Twitter usage around popular TV shows. When GetGlue turned off
sharing features with Twitter for five popular TV programs on Sept. 2, 2012,
all showed declines. Twitter activity around Breaking Bad, for example, slipped by 9% while Leverage dropped 74%.
