Twitter activity matches TV viewers' engagement: study

New York

TWITTER might not be a window into the soul, but it does provide a clear view into what grabs our attention on television, according to new research being published this week.

Nielsen, the data company best known for its TV ratings, hooked up about 300 people to brain monitors and followed their reactions as they watched new episodes of eight prime-time TV shows. Researchers then compared those measurements with the volume of messages on Twitter about the same shows when they were broadcast.

The conclusion: The number of tweets correlated closely with TV viewers' depth of engagement with whatever was appearing on the screen at that moment.

"You can use the Twitter activity to predict the engagement of the show," said Avgusta Shestyuk, director of neuroscience at Nielsen Neuro, the division that conducted the research. "As the audiences are getting more engaged with the segment,…