Twitter and Facebook Wield Little Influence on TV Watching

Listen to executives at Twitter and Facebook talk about how we watch television and you might walk away thinking that Americans are chattering nonstop on the social networks while watching their favorite shows. The reality is that most of us don’t tweet or post at all while we’re plopped in front of the tube.

When we do, half the time we’re talking about something other than TV. And social media conversation is far weaker than traditional factors, like TV commercials for new shows or our sheer laziness in changing channels, in prompting us to tune into each season’s new offerings.

Those are among the crucial findings of a new study to be released by the Council for Research Excellence, a Nielsen-funded group that does in-depth research on how Americans use media that is shared with its member broadcasters, advertisers, publishers and social media companies. The council surveyed 1,665 respondents, ages 15 to 54, who were selected to be representative of the online population.

The participants used a mobile app to report any time they saw, heard or communicated something about prime-time TV shows over the course of 21 days last fall, as the new season’s lineup of TV shows made their debuts. Only 16.1 percent of the survey respondents said they had used social media while watching TV during prime time. And less than half of the people using social media were actually discussing the show they were watching.