Bluefin Labs on Twitter-Nielsen Deal

Nielsen today announced a deal with Twitter to provide the “Nielsen Twitter TV Rating” for the US market, slated to start with the fall market 2013, the company said.

Nielsen said in a release that this agreement will produce the “first-ever measurement of the total audience for social TV activity – both those participating in the conversation and those who were exposed to the activity – providing the precise size of the audience and effect of social TV to TV programming.”

Currently, there are an estimated 114.2 million television households in the United States and an estimated 140 million Twitter users in the U.S. out of a total of 500 million users, according to Twitter.

Bluefin Labs CEO JP Maheu told Social TV Daily in an e-mail that the Nielsen Twitter partnership shows the importance of social TV ratings for TV networks, but also made the point that its services go beyond “counting tweets.”

Maheu’s response:

“Because of its unique ad tracking capabilities, Bluefin Labs is the only company that has the ability to measure how consumers respond to TV commercials via social media. Bluefin Labs remains focused on driving new innovations in social TV analytics, not just by focusing on one dimensional ratings and rankings, but by providing rich and actionable multi-dimensional analytics [affinity data] to brands and TV networks.”