Twitter gets into the headlines on many news stations for various reasons, be it breaking news about potential uprisings or information from war zones and disaster areas.

I’ll cover the reliability of this in a future post but Twitter has also recently been in the spotlight when it comes to advertising during such events and other high profile activities on television.

The Only True Second Screen

While many mobile apps are being developed for specific TV shows and events, Twitter see themselves as the only true companion app for broadcast media. People do sit down and watch “the game”, follow tweets, tweet themselves and chat about it. I know I was doing that over the US Open and will be for Wimbledon too.

In a recent interview with the NY Times  Twitter’s director of brand and agency strategy led a presentation highlighting how Twitter would be introducing a product, that helps brands match advertisements with Twitter commentary by viewers. Brands have the opportunity to send messages to selected Twitter users who have already seen their ad on television.

No matter how the product eventually works, Twitter can at least say to potential advertisers that their users pay attention to live TV and so can be targeted accordingly.

There is more information on this on Bloomberg, or watch this short video interview with Deb Roy from Twitter on the Guardian web site.

Consumption Study

In a report done by Motorola Mobility in March one of the key findings was the following:

Fifty percent of global consumers do not follow social media conversations about a TV program on a companion device while watching the program, but younger audiences are more inclined to interact – 60 per cent of 16-24-year-olds do follow social conversations during programming.

Not for All

While this advertising solution may not be the best for everyone, perhaps you could ride the wave and follow the hot #hashtags and capture users that are already engaged. Of course you already know a bit about the users as they are tweeting about a known topic. This is a great opportunity to build conversation.

Eurovision

Back to live events on TV and EzyInsights even got a bit of publicity in Finland during the Eurovision Song contest. Did you see us on Finnish national TV?

So what do you do with the data -do you already know your audience? Here’s a chance to get to know them better 🙂