TV Industry Taps Social Media to Keep Viewer’s Attention

TV Industry Taps Social Media to Keep Viewers’ Attention

This was a very interesting article in that it depicts how helpful social media is in increasing the amount of viewers of a certain TV show. This article states that while people are watching a TV show or some special event on TV, they are also tweeting or updating their status on Facebook about it. This in turn creates a greater audience for that show, because those people see that update, and want to view in to that show as well. I find this very interesting because I too find myself doing this whenever I see someone post about something I want to watch on TV. I find it pretty amazing how they are now making applications on things such as the iPad to correlate with shows on real time. This is pretty smart, because they are trying to gain a bigger audience to watch the show in real time instead of recording it, and watching it a later time. The article makes a reference to the “water-cooler effect” which is a revealing look at how we spread rumors, and why people believe them. Through the use of social media they are studying how when one person tells people on a social network such as twitter what they are watching; how that evolves into more and more viewers for that certain show. One thing I find amazing is that during the Superbowl Twitter users sent 4,064 messages each second. No wonder this was the greatest amount of viewers of a Superbowl of all times. The last thing I want to comment on about this article is that is says the a majority of people watching TV are multitasking. They state that out of 2000 people asked 42% sometimes surfed the Web while watching TV, and 26% sometimes sent instant message or texts while watching TV. This illustrates how a majority of people watching TV are also advertising for shows, by texting others usually about what they are doing, such as what TV show they are watching or they are on some social network site.