The coming age of Twittervision

For over 65 years, the $70bn TV industry has been traded on one currency...now all that is about to change.

Twitter's Vice President Joel Lunenfeld recently appeared on a Bloomberg TV segment to discuss the findings of a study linking tweets to live TV, and more importantly for his shareholders, to announce a new partnership and ranking method devised with Nielsen.

The two behemoths want to make watching TV with Twitter (see:second screen experience) 'even better for you, the TV fan,' according to Twitter's blog post on the announcement.

What does this coming new age of measurement mean for marketers and what can you do now to prepare? Read on to find out.

From GRP (reach) to engagement

While some may approach these revelations with trepidation -- and for good reason since the study came AFTER a partnership between Twitter and Nielsen was secured -- there is no denying that Twitter drives up TV rankings in bumps we can all agree on.

Econsultancy has aggregated stats on Twitter and TV, and followed the space closely, so it's not a question of 'whether' with us, it's more of 'when' will the new laws and metrics for supporting evidence around engagement in real-time truly break.

If you are currently an advertiser using Twitter's proprietary dashboard for promoted tweets, you know that the following segments can be altered for demographics. 

• Keywords in timeline.
• Interest.
• Geography.
• Gender.
• Similarity to existing followers.
• Additional targeting options for Tweets include:
• Device (mobile, desktop).
• Keyword search results 

The harbingers you can't ignore

Fragmentation and multichannel marketing are the painful achilles heel of our modern marketer, but Twitter is consistently reporting on spikes that are undeniably tied to the last truly unifying medium of television.

What other signifiers can I point you towards to drive home the point?

How about:

1. MTV's recent sponsorship record for the VMAs (publicly tied by MTV representatives to "social media momentum") despite a ratings slump.
2. Viacom and Twitter's plan to further expand video ad roll during the upcoming Comedy Central James Franco roast, which will probably not match real-time reach of the Super Bowl in the States, but in my personal opinion should...

What can you do now to prepare?

It's not just about the spend though, for businesses to truly take advantage of their promoted ad campaigns they should continue to engage and interact.

Providing relevant content when it's most important to consumers will keep brand a part of the daily conversation, and increase the effectiveness of promoted advertisements.

Additionally, choose your influencer tracking tools wisely. As long as your team is coordinated and focused in their outreach to augment any advertising/promoted tweets your brand should only benefit.

Remember it's still early days, and we are all still in schooling. While more data, and more "device enabled" viewing steadily rolls out, marketers will slowly wade out to the deep end.

Brush up on Twitter analytics via some of Econsultancy's research!

Let me know what your thoughts are about the future of connected TV and Twitter's place in this...