The astonishing ratings success of Fox’s Empire will undoubtedly be parsed and analyzed for years to come, but a new research released this week from Fox and Twitter has found that promotional or “paid audience” tweets helped boost engagement with the show.
Last year, research from Fox, the Advertising Research Foundation, Db5 and Twitter had found that 90% of those who saw TV-related tweets about the show took some action to further engage with the show by watching, sharing content or searching for information about a show, Anjali Midha, global media and agency research director at Twitter recently wrote.
The new research released this week was designed to build on those findings by looking at the impact of promotional tweets.
To see the impact, the study divided audience up into three groups: those who had not seen Empire related tweets; those who saw TV-rated tweets and those are saw both TV-related tweets and promotion tweets with tune in information.
Those research found that those who had been exposed to both TV-rated tweets and the promotional tweets had a 23% higher engagement rate.
Using Nielsen Brand Effect data, the research found that among those 18 to 34, those who got both TV related tweets and promotion tweets had a much higher familiarity with Empire and were much more likely to tune in.
About 15% of those who hadn’t seen any tweets planned to watch live while 26% of those who had seen TV-related tweets did. Among those who had seen both the TV related tweets and the promotional tweets, 36% said they planned to watch live.
Midha noted in the blog that “the lifts observed in this experiment were the largest ever measured through Nielsen Brand Effect for Twitter.
Overall the promoted tweets generated 17.5 million impressions and an additional 4.2 million impressions from retweets.
More data from the research can be found here.
