Analyzing the Impact of Social TV Strategies on Viewer Engagement

“Social TV” is a term that broadly describes the online social interactions that occur between viewers while watching television. Television shows are now instigating online social interactions between viewers by requesting viewers, as part of the first broadcasts, to engage in simultaneous discussions about the shows. Examples include explicitly asking users to follow and comment on topics on the popular social media site, Twitter. A more passive approach used by TV shows displays messages from social media users on the TV screen during broadcasts. While many shows now include social media in their broadcasts, very little is known about the effectiveness of these strategies on engagement and viewership. In this work, we analyze features of the social media strategy of an American reality singing show. We show that when messages are posted on the TV screen during the show, they are much more likely to be discussed by viewers than messages created by the same online social media users during the show that are not posted on the screen, indicating that this strategy works. We also show that when a prompt is given to use a specific term in discussions online, viewers are more likely to remain engaged with the show on social media. We believe this is the first scholarly work to link real-time TV posts to realtime TV engagement response. Our contribution is a set of results, which show that prompting viewers during the show with social media posts on screen results in increased and prolonged engagement during the show.