Where Are We Now: Newer Survey Research

When last we spoke to Brian Ring, the third edition of his study on Social TV viewership behaviors had just debuted. That edition clearly established YouTube as a rising star in Social TV. Fresh from NAB Show, Ring is back with the fourth edition, surfacing some interesting points about the strength of Twitter, the nature of Social TV in News content, and the impact of time-shifting technologies on sports viewing.The fourth version of the study has been slightly tweaked, according to Ring, to achieve a “more accurate barometer of recently active social TV engagers.” Ring is now requiring respondents “have recently” engaged in social TV behaviors, and allows for a follow-up question on how active those engagers are The new study reveals that roughly 27% of engagers, which Ring approximates equals 20% of the internet population (or roughly 15 million internet users) are engaging in some form of social media behavior two to three times a month. Even more interesting is that a full 8 million viewers are habitual in this behavior – engaging in social TV activity more than 7 times a month.Another major finding was the fact that he’s seeing growth for Twitter for the first time since the very first survey. After establishing a benchmark in the first study, Ring has seen Twitter’s usage decrease over the following two studies. This study, however, finds roughly 28% of users utilizing the service, a 6 percentage point increase over the last study. Ring believes this results is due to Twitter’s strength in News content. “If you look at the genres which are seeing the most SocialTV activity, we saw News rise this time, probably because of the election.” This, coupled with Twitter’s announcement of their Q1 MAU growth, means that Donald Trump may inadvertently be helping to #MakeTwitterGreatAgain.With the fourth study in the books, Ring knows a fifth version will be needed. And he has a few ideas about broadening his approach. The fifth version will focus on “a more general changing TV index that has insight on social, on sports, and on news”, a field that interests Ring. Whenever the next version comes out, we’ll be sure to fill you in on it.