This morning Twitter’s UK head of broadcast partnerships, Dan Biddle (@danbiddle), provided a number of examples for using Twitter to improve TV interaction at today’s MIPCube Talks session.
Twitter has 200 million global users, who post about 1 billion tweets every 2.5 days. 60% of those users access the site via mobile; the number is 80% in the UK.
And in the UK, 40% of Tweets made during peak TV hours are about TV. « Twitter is the room we watch TV in, » he proclaimed, adding that « the hashtag is the campfire around which everybody tells stories. »
His examples included Channel 4, whose documentary Dogging Tales generated 120.2 million Twitter impressions with hashtag #doggingtales. People felt like they needed to watch it when talk about the show overloaded their feeds, and catchup TV also benefited from the Twitter deluge.
But you can also be a little more creative. For their show Saturday Night Takeaway, the @antanddec team kicks off weekly with a frozen pose. Realising they could « get the audience to do stuff before the show, » which would get people worked up for it, they started asking followers what their pose of the week should be. this became their call to action; they now receive poses in droves.
@antanddec @itvtakeaway please use my daughters pose for your last show it will make her day 🙂 #topofthestairsposes twitter.com/Tracey1921/sta…
— Tracey Sharpe (@Tracey1921) April 6, 2013
Another example was #Fishfight, which seeks to raise awareness for unsustainably fed prawns. For a commercial break, the show encouraged users to tweet supermarkets with the question, « What are your prawns eating? #fishfight ». 16,000 tweets poured in during the break.
« They had a two-minute window to do the activation. But the campaign was enlargened, and the show was made more engaging, » said Biddle.
He then mentioned @pac12, whereby ESPN tweets instant replays. « They know someone else is gonna do it; they might as well be first to market and have their brand attached to that content, » said Biddle.
These tweets are also sponsored by Ford, whose promotion of the tweets pushes them to more feeds. « Your great content gets spread, more people see it, it gets out there further. »
He wrapped by encouraging us to amplify the tweet spot, much like Oreo did when electricity was suddenly cut off at the Super Bowl. (Incidentally, Twitter was mentioned in 50% of Super Bowl ads this year.) Its timely « You can still dunk in the dark » ad, shared on Twitter, generated over 15,000 retweets and more than 20,000 likes on Facebook.
« Think about programming Twitter as you programme your channel. Get people engaged, talking beforehand. Give them extras, » Biddle finished.
To provide general ideas of the many ways to « programme Twitter », he shared the following slide, loaded with helpful network- and brand-relevant ideas. Plenty to take away!
