In what could be termed as the most enriching and educational session of the Asia TV Forum, the Asia Pacific team at Twitter took to stage on educating the attendees on how they could ideally use Twitter like some of their recent partners to do some groundbreaking stuff on one of the oldest mediums of entertainment.
“Television has certainly evolved in the recent past and what we intend to do is capture live moments on television and make them memorable and to have a recall value,” says Twitter – Australia, head of TV partnerships, Tony Broderick. “We work on four key principles, Twitter is live; it’s public; it’s conversational and it helps in distribution of content.”
The online social media platform currently caters to the communication needs of nearly 284 million users globally, with nearly 80 per cent of these coming from mobile platforms and having over 500 million tweets being put out every day. Now those are some really impressive numbers.
Speaking a bit more on the partnerships that Twitter has been involved in the recent past, Twitter – India head of TV & entertainment partnerships, Pratiksha Rao expounds: “We have various broadcast partners, who have used our platform to increase interactions and exchange ideas with their audience for a more inclusive viewing experience and it has helped them in also garnering increased viewership for their shows in the recent past.”
She highlighted examples of how shows like ‘Scandal’ and ‘The Voice’ have successfully managed to use the platform to not only engage with the TV audience, but also encourage them to talk back to the show and actors as well.
“I am sure everyone is aware of the ‘Ellen Degeneres’ Oscar selfie’. That photo was retweeted over 3.4 million times; it managed to make 3.3 billion impressions and nearly 4.2 billion internet mentions (which is almost a third of the world population). That is the power of social media,” Pratiksha adds. 
The social platform is now also helping ratings agencies like Video Research in Japan and Nielson in the US and Australia to also add the aspect of social media interactions and mentions during the airing of shows as a measuring medium for a more holistic and meaningful result, which is also beneficial to the networks and broadcasters to approach brands with more consolidated viewership numbers.
And with the Twitter Amplifier feature also available now, the platform is helping its partners to monetise their content as well. Giving more details about the monetisation feature Twitter – South Korea, head of TV partnerships, Kim Minyoung says: “Twitter Amplifier enables both our partner and the brand to get the right visibility and messaging across without acting as an intrusion in the content.”
Kim shares a few insights on how brand integrations foster and curate conversations as well. She adds that more than 66 per cent viewers prefer to see tweets coming from the official show or network accounts for information. Also, according to a few recent researches conducted by Twitter, live tweeting during the show increases viewer numbers as well.
The Twitter Amplifier feature is currently available across 10 countries, with over 100 content partners and an ever growing brand sponsorship partner base of nearly 100 top brands globally. The company currently has offices in Japan, Korea, India, Australia and Malaysia in the Asia Pacific region and is soon opening offices in Indonesia and Hong Kong.
And the biggest news coming out of Twitter now is the fact that it has recently been informed of being honoured with an Emmy Award for having changed the way television is viewed in recent times. It certainly seems this ‘birdy’ has all the more reason to ‘tweet – tweet’ (Pun Intended!).
