Facebook vs. Twitter: Heavyweights Battle for Social TV

Posted by Emma Wells in Writers on April 25, 2011  |  6 Comments More from this author  |

Facebook wants to be the primary gateway to social TV. The problem is, so does Twitter.

While Facebook dominates some industry conversation, they are only starting to make inroards into social TV.

Despite Facebook’s 500 million users, it is rarely mentioned as part of the social TV conversation. Indeed, most of the social TV buzz happens around Twitter- the industry gets excited about how many people Tweeted during the Oscars or Super bowl, but not how many Facebook statuses mentioned an event.

But now it looks like Facebook is trying to elbow its way into the social TV conversation.

Facebook has started attending TV industry conferences, and raising the company’s social TV profile. Facebook’s head of International Business gave an interesting speech at MIPTV a few weeks ago about how Facebook can be used as the “second screen” to enhance the TV experience and foster TV-based communities.

Naturally Facebook provides a great social platform that TV operators could leverage- but tapping reliable statistics is much harder. Unlike Twitter, not all status updates are available publicly through the API – this makes any reported conversation stats approximate at best. And in an age where ROI is paramount, lack of information creates barriers to adoption.

Facebook’s TV show pages are also showing incredible growth. This gives Facebook a strong database to work with, and makes integration with social TV features easier:

But despite this, Facebook is slowly making inroads into social TV.

True Blood

Following an immensely successful second season on air, True Blood’s Season 2 Box Set was launched with an interactive Facebook campaign.

The promotion created a unique social experience in which viewers of the Blu-ray box set could watch their Facebook and Twitter accounts transform as they watched each episodes.

Using BD-Live, viewers could link their Blu-ray players to their social media accounts. As a result, 40% of viewers who paired up their Blu-ray were active every night, generating 9,000 scenes shared to Facebook feeds. Roughly one-third of all the virtual gifts unlocked were given to non-users, helping to spread the word. As a result, True Blood Season 2 was the number-one TV title released on Blu-ray and DVD in 2010.

Million Pound Drop

The show Million Pound Drop was supported by a wildly successful Facebook game. The show estimated that 8-10% of the TV audience played the game.

The game also served as an opportunity for advertiser sponsorship, helping monetise the second screen. The game featured social components that let players compete against their friends. The game was integrated into the live-event as well: the live show featured a real-time game leader board. Players were also incentivised to play; the best players had a chance to go on the show and play. 8-10% of TV audience plays the game.

American Idol

American Idol is piloting a programme where users can login with Facebook and vote for their favourite performer. Like the Million Pound Drop game, the voting is monetised through a sponsorship. American Idol is looking to further monetise the system in the future by allowing users to buy votes based on Facebook credit.

The other benefit of using Facebook is that it operates with unique user IDs. This makes it relatively simple to manage the 1-man-1-vote system. Additionally, each time someone votes, that news is shared with all their friends, providing low cost marketing.

Top Gear

Top Gear demonstrates how a TV show can successfully leverage Facebook as marketing and commercial vehicle. To begin with, the show has 7 million fans on Facebook. The page is used as a hub of content and conversation.

To guarantee conversation after each episode ends, Top Gear posts clips of the last episode on Facebook. This reminds viewers about the highlights, and helps fans share and talk about each episode on Facebook. Additionally, Top Gear posts behind scenes video clips, making the fans feel part of a privileged community. This has met with strong success: 40% of Top Gear’s Facebook fans consume a piece of Top Gear content every week.

Top Gear has also fully integrated Facebook onto their web portal: Facebook is Topgear.com’s second largest traffic driver. The whole site is designed to make it made it easy for visitors to engage and share top Gear with their friends; every piece of content on their site has a like button. This enables it to be easily shared and amplified on Facebook. One picture had 10,000 likes- the average user has 130 friends on average- so just 10,000 “likes” generates a lot of traffic.

Of course, what Facebook neglects to mention is that there is extensive Twitter integration on the site as well.

While TV operators can provide light integration with both Twitter and Facebook like Top Gear demonstrates. However, ultimately TV executives have to decide where their money is best spent. And because Twitter dominates social TV buzz, they look set to dominate in the short term.

However, as Facebook builds up success in the market and starts to build its social TV reputation, Twitter needs to watch its back.

Emma blogs for TV Genius over at the TV Trends Blog. TV Genius is a software company that has specialised in TV content discovery, recommendations, search, and interactive TV guides since 2005.