Nielsen to Measure Twitter Chatter About TV Shows

Nielsen is now measuring what it calls the “unique audience” for Twitter posts about television, providing a more complete view of the phenomenon known as social TV.

The company is introducing Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings, a product announced last year that professes to measure all the activity and reach of Twitter conversation about shows, even if it has yet to be embraced by television executives and gain a broad client base. Measures of posts about a TV show are just the tip of Twitter’s iceberg: “The full iceberg is the extent to which people are seeing those tweets,” said Andrew Somosi, the chief executive of SocialGuide, an analytics company that Nielsen acquired last November, in part to create the new product.