Not If But How Twitter And Facebook Will Drive Social TV

written by: Gianluigi Cuccureddu

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Published on Wednesday, 23 March 2011 14:04

Beverly Macy at the Huffingtonpost published the article "Will Twitter Drive Social TV?", to answer one of here posed questions at the end "Or will a new social architecture emerge that includes some combination of Twitter, coupons, shopping, mobile pay, and check-in apps?", Twitter and Facebook are rich sources of intel that are diffused and primary sources of ones digital ID. 

Here is why

From an active, partaking point of view, real-time interaction and engagement will enable (live) co-programming, taking into account the good and bad opinions of viewers into the format for any relevant kind of use. The reason that Twitter will be the platform for this is the real-time angle, its volume of users and the low barrier to spew any opinion on the subject. This will advance a level of ownership, more adapted to viewers and loyalty.

From a "passive" point of view, Facebook and its rich profile data is a serious candidate of providing broadcasters an opportunity to hypersegmentate viewers around programming, being able to give content owners and brands a more relevant and qualitative audience. The win-win here is a higher premium price for its advertising around programming or a better fit in branded content. In a previous article we referred to the effect of Social TV on the growth of advertising revenues. At the 90:10 Group we are developing technologies that are able to tap into the rich data for purposes such as hypersegmentation, social advertising and so on.

A second advantage is that profile data is dynamic, being up to date both demand and supply can take their advantage of it, next to the fact that it's an efficient way of maintaining data. 

Revenue models

Besides the options that Macy mentioned, I'd think of the following ones, these include (B2C) social commerce, product placement, any credits to participate in the programming/show, but also (B2B) such as advanced analytics in viewer behavior, enhanced API's to tap into, and any other possible way of creating added value through the data pipeline.

The more overarching way of generating new or additional revenue streams is Transmedia. Different entry points, different devices with different angles are all potential revenue generators, add co-creation, ownership and the exclusivity of partaking in such a project/show and television will reach its new level of attention.