Association of Internet Researchers conference (AoIR 2014)

Introducing Telemetrics: The Weighted Tweet Index

Darryl Woodford, Katie Prowd, Axel Bruns, Ben Goldsmith, Stephen Harrington, and Jean Burgess

• 22-25 Oct. 2014 – Association of Internet Researchers conference, Daegu

This paper introduces a new methodology for analyzing and measuring engagement with television content by users of Twitter. Drawing on factors such as the network, viewing audience, and date of broadcast to establish a baseline expectation for volume of tweets around a television show, and applying techniques from the field of sabermetrics to create neutral volume figures (‘weighted tweets’) which exclude these variables, our metrics provide new insights into television’s social media presence. The methodology provides a variety of new measures for analysing the social media strategies of individual television programs, channels and networks, for comparing users’ engagement with programs, channels or networks, and for predicting future volumes of tweets.