Nielsen Rolls Out Analysis of Owned Vs. Organic Social Activity

Nielsen Tuesday is launching a new social media measurement tool that will allow broadcasters to see how effective activity coming from the station, as well as the general public, is at building buzz.

The new service separately analyzes the effectiveness of station-owned and organic social activity, primarily by measuring the engagement they each generate, Nielsen said. In doing so, broadcasters can better see what is and isn’t working—and identify influencers among public participants, it said.

The service, which launches Tuesday in the U.S., will start by measuring Twitter activity. Nielsen said it plans to add analysis of Facebook and Instagram data at a later date.

“Networks and advertisers need to understand how social content is resonated with the audiences and whether owned strategies are driving impact,” said Johann Dudley, Nielsen social senior VP, product leadership.

During a week in March, for instance, Nielsen found that 64% of program-related Twitter engagement resulted from organic content, vs. station-generated tweets. Those numbers varied, however, depending on program type and genre, it said.

(Photo via Pabak Sarkar's Flickr. Image taken on Feb. 15, 2017 and used per Creative Commons 2.0 license. The photo was cropped to fit 9x16 aspect ratio.)