Social Media Engagement with Italian TV

The next AoIR 2015 speaker is Fabio Giglietto, whose interest is in social television practices in Italy, around political talkshow Servizio Pubblico and reality TV contest X-Factor. What moments of these broadcasts trigger audience engagement? What similarities or differences are there in communication styles?

Fabio's project gathered relevant tweets from the shows' hashtags, and generated a number of key volumetric statistics on user activity; X-Factor audiences were considerably more active. They then algorithmically identified the major peaks in each of the shows' episodes, and explored the key dynamics for each peak.

Key drivers of audience engagement identified were surprise and suspense; both of these were present in X-Factor, which regularly includes the suspense of voting outcomes, with only the former was prominent for Servizio Pubblico. Further, X-Factor was stronger on original tweets, while Servizio Pubblico was slightly stronger on retweets, which may suggest a kind of coaching process where views are borrowed from lead users through retweeting them rather than expressed outright.

This may also point to a range of different audience communication strategies. In the political talkshow, for example, there was a tendency to formulate opinion as a joke rather than as outright statements, while there was unsurprisingly also a greater focus on sharing information. Television content formats thus also have a framing effect for audience behaviour.