NextTV: Fox Social Media Strategy Focused on Engagement

Digital chief says net is "viewer-centric"

By Mike Farrell, Multichannel News -- Broadcasting & Cable, 3/21/2013 2:51:19 PM

New York -- Fox Broadcasting's digital president David Wertheimer said the television giant's social media strategy is focused on bringing back human interaction to viewing entertainment.

At the NextTV Summit, sponsored by Multichannel News and B&C, Wertheimer told moderator, B&C executive editor Dade Hayes, that Fox's main goal in social media is to drive deeper engagement for viewers in its shows.

And Fox has some of the more socially engaged programs on broadcast TV.  Its American Idol virtually invented the space and averages many hundreds of thousands of tweets per show -- Wertheimer said last year's finale numbered 1.4 million tweets, which he said translates into reaching a total of 1 billion people worldwide.

"The mission of our team is to form dynamic and enduring relationships with viewers," Wertheimer said. "We are very viewer-centric."

But the Fox exec wasn't so quick to embrace a recent Nielsen study that showed that tweets from viewers has a correlation to higher ratings.

"These stats are useful and interesting [and] help people who aren't pushing as hard as we are," Wertheimer said. "...The more engaged people are with shows, the more valuable they are to advertisers