TV Audiences & The Secrets Of Twitter

When I was 12, I met my first “girlfriend” – Angela. I met her at a basketball camp. She had Gerri-Curl and a better jump shot than I and, crucially, she was the only girl that would talk to me.  I thought she was amazing.  I say she was a “girlfriend” but in reality the totality of the “relationship” consisted of watching the American Sci-Fi television series V about an alien invasion in our respective homes and talking about it on the phone as we watched it “together”.

But while young men and the occasional 12 year-old boys might have been the target audience for the Sci-Fi series, I doubt the programme makers were thinking that young black British girls might be interested in watching their alien invasion saga. As a programme maker, discovering who your audience really are can be a surprise.

I have started to discover some surprises about my audience recently through the power of the Twitter hash-tag. Hash-tags allow you to pull together people who are tweeting about the same subject to see what other people are saying about the same issue.  Increasingly, programmes are using twitter hash-tags to enable online / twitter group conversations about a programme as it is being broadcast. Want to know whether other people are thinking the same thing as you when you hear that awful / great intervention on BBC Question Time? Then follow the Twitter hash-tag #BBCQT and you’ll find out.

Broadcasters are turning to hash-tags for a number of reasons:

1. It means that people watch the programmes as they go out (great for advertisers).

2. Hash-tags turn a simple television into a social event.

3.Over 40% of people do other things like play with their phones while watching TV. This keeps their attention on your film even if they are doing something else.

4. Hash-tags help to generate a buzz about a programme.

For people interested in diversity issues on television, what the hash-tags also do is give a great insight into who is watching your programmes and what they think about them. It also causes you to confront your own prejudices as to whom you think is watching your output.

Like Angela, my black “ex-girlfriend” obsessed with Sci-Fi, I’ve found that my audiences rarely fit my target expectations and are a lot more diverse than I expect. For example, earlier this year I exec’ed a 60 minute film called “Portillo On Salmond”. It featured Michael Portillo following Alec Salmond on the election trail as he won an historic second term. With a hash-tag of #PortilloOnSalmond, I was able to see who was watching and what interested the audience. What amazed me was the level of tweeting that occurred when the film showed Alec Salmond campaigning in an Asian neighbourhood.  Knowing what I know now, if we were to cut the film again, I would definitely want the director to feature more of how Alec Salmond won the Asian vote.  It has also made me think about whether to commission a radio programme looking at the rise of the importance of the BME vote in Scotland.

It goes without saying that one has to be careful when looking at your audiences through Twitter hash-tags. There is no doubt that Twitter is not completely representative of the general viewing public – it skews towards the young and web savvy. But the hash-tags are still useful to execs and producers because when a programme goes out no longer is our audience an amorphous blob represented by large ratings figures the next day. We can now see the modern equivalent of the 12 year old Angela’s and myself in the audience and “eavesdrop” on what they are saying about our programmes.  Once other execs and producers realise the diversity of their audiences, I’m hoping, like me, they will be more willing to reflect the audience’s own diversity and cast diverse talent on screen, as well as cover issues that reflect their diverse interests.  Now that will make TV far more personal, interesting and something worth tweeting about.