The Spoiler Effect?: Designing Social TV Content That Promotes Ongoing WOM

Television shows are now instigating online social interactions between viewers by requesting viewers, as part of the first broadcasts, to participate in simultaneous discussions about shows. In this work, we analyze and quantify the effect of strategies used in an American reality singing show to engage viewers. We show three main results: 1) when specific tweet messages are posted on the TV screen during the show, the tweets 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; 2) there is a difference between social media engagement response to specific tweet messages and more general social media content-specific tweets with new information result in more engagement on the first show airing; and 3) there is a difference in overall response to specific social media tweet messages on the West Coast of the US since results by the time of airing have been spoiled.