social media

Facebook said Tuesday that it’s testing video advertisements that show up in its users’ news feeds. As part of the test, Facebook said some of its users on Thursday will see a series of videos teasing Summit Entertainment’s upcoming release of Divergent, a film based on a young adult novel with the same name, in their feeds.

A slew of broadcasters have agreed to make their content available via Twitter and Comcast’s new “See It” platform. The idea behind See It is just what the name implies: Users who see tweets about shows and video content will be able to jump directly from Twitter to watch or record the shows on Comcast or any other cable operator who is signed on.

Vivian Schiller, the former NPR and NBC executive who will start as Twitter’s first news partnerships leader in January, in a blog post explained why she left NBC for Twitter. In part, her interest in Twitter seems to be much the same as her interest in NBC: she wants to use new technology to help media companies reach a broader audience.

TVB CEO Steve Lanzano: “Nielsen’s Social Guide reported that Sound of Music was the No. 1 topic on Twitter for the night the program aired and for the entire week, generating nearly 54,000 more tweets than the No. 2 TV-tweeted program, Scandal, did on Dec. 5.”

Internet companies including Twitter, Facebook, Google and Amazon are blasting a federal judge’s decision allowing an Arizona-based gossip website to be sued for defamation by a former Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader convicted of having sex with a teenager. The companies warn that the ruling to let the former cheerleader’s lawsuit proceed has the potential to “significantly chill online speech.”

Sweet on Twitter, the entertainment business continues to test the network as a tool for marketing, measurement and even script adaptations. Blurring the lines between marketing and content creation, TNT is floating an “adaptweetion” of ita new series Mob City.

The executives behind the new series about Los Angeles mobsters in the 1940s are taking a new approach to promotion by tweeting the first episode’s script.

Images taken by CNN journalists showing ‘scenes from the field’ will be shared via its new online platform, to engage with their community beyond traditional reporting.

Continuing its drive to own the social TV space, Twitter has announced a new feature that allows networks and brands to promote tweets to people who chatter about certain shows, whether or not a brand is running a TV spot during a given program.

Tucked away in the corner of its app, Twitter is now promoting TV shows to its users, supposedly based on the amount of chatter they are generating on the service. The Twitter TV promotions aren’t formal ads, though you could easily imagine a way Twitter might charge for them, directly or indirectly. More important to Twitter is the idea that it can drive traffic to TV shows (which it also trying to do with Comcast and the cable company’s “Seeit” buttons).

Some 30% of U.S. adults get their news from Facebook, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. YouTube was second, with 10% of the population getting its news on the site, and Twitter followed with only 3% of the population using it for news.

Twitter and its users took control of NBC last night in the final minutes of the network’s hit reality competition series The Voice, ushering in a new era of television viewer connectivity and quite likely changing the way other broadcast networks will look at their signature competition hits.

For the past month, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and his team have been pitching TV networks and ad execs on a new way to make money, called Amplify, that allows Twitter and its media partners to sell ads against snippets of shows or other video clips. But while the company is clearly looking to exploit the buzz around TV shows, Madison Avenue is proving to be a skeptical audience, according to ad execs who are wary of sharing ad dollars and clients.

The stock opened at $45.10 a share on its first day of trading, 73% above its initial offering price. The stock is now trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TWTR. It’s the most highly anticipated initial public stock offering since Facebook debuted last year.

TV viewers tweet much more during commercial time than program time — contradicting an earlier study on the activity. A new Magna Global study shows viewers posted 21% more tweets per minute during commercial minutes compared to program minutes. The research also says the rate of tweeting in commercial time rises as the total number of tweets (in program and commercial time) increases.

On Tom Wheeler’s second day as chairman of the FCC, or as he called it, the “optimism agency,” Wheeler blogged. He talked about himself, the staff he appointed on Monday, the FCC’s place in history, and he began to set the framework for a Wheeler-led FCC policy. Call him the blogging chairman. No other FCC chair shared as much of himself or his point of view as quickly and as openly. Wheeler’s blog post, was based on remarks he delivered Tuesday to the FCC staff.

Justin Auciello, founder of the Jersey Shore Hurricane News Facebook page, on the news service he created prior to 2011’s Hurricane Irene: “My vision was to provide a ground swell of accurate information — no spin, no rumors — from both personal reporting and news curation from all angles, including potential weather impacts, evacuation orders, shelter information, store closures and breaking news.”

In just three years, the percentage of consumers watching TV during primetime who use Twitter has increased by more than 60%, and nearly 15% of those consumers who view TV during primetime on a typical day have also used Twitter in the past 30 days, compared to 9.2% just two years ago, according to a new report from The Media Audit.

The NFL’s new deal with Twitter isn’t causing the same level of angst among TV networks as the league’s extensive content deal with Verizon earlier this year or the launch of NFL RedZone four years ago. But network executives privately express annoyance over the Twitter agreement, which allows the league to tweet game highlights from its handle throughout the week but not during network telecasts.

VidLytics features comprehensive infographics of national and local television viewing, including broadcast, syndication, Spanish-language, buyer data and local news and social media metrics.

Over the past two years, the growth in Twitter activity around TV shows has been nothing short of remarkable. Tweets about live TV and the number of Twitter authors talking about TV programming are both increasing in double-digit fashion, steadily broadening the landscape at a record pace.

Real-time TV viewing and social media interactions are growing — but still a small piece of overall U.S. TV viewership. Around 15% to 17% of TV viewers are having real-time conversations about TV.

Social media in the newsroom has boomed to the point where major breaking news stories come with a hashtag to keep people engaged with the story on their social accounts. Broadcasters who want to monitor and air those social updates have plenty of options, ranging from the $600 jury-rigged solution all the way to a $30,000 high-end system.

Jon Steinberg, BuzzFeed’s president and chief operating officer, claims the site is an increasingly important source of hard news for young people, in an appearance at the MIPCOM conference in Cannes today. “We feel strongly that traditional media have given up on young people, and have not made a commitment to tell stories that are interesting for people under 40 or 50 years old,” Steinberg says.

Comcast engineers created a new feature called “See It” that will be made available to millions of Xfinity customers. Beginning in November, the feature will allow audiences to access TV shows, movies and sports directly from a tweet. In a customer’s news feed will be the option to click the “See It” button and access live television, set a DVR, enable a reminder or buy theater tickets through Fandango.

Twitter’s public S-1 filing revealed details on tweet distribution and plans for growing ad revenue through Twitter Amplify and real-time TV ad targeting. These plans and details show how Twitter could take $1 billion dollars in ad revenue from YouTube.

In what the network is characterizing as its most ambitious co-branded marketing campaign to date, the CW and Ford have teamed up on a cross-platform initiative that will give viewers a sneak peek at a roster of new and returning series. Rolling out today, the campaign incorporates elements from Ford’s social engagement effort (“Fiesta Movement: A Social Remix”).

Facebook has plugged a gap in its sales organization, hiring David Lawenda to be its VP-global sales for the U.S. As Facebook’s new U.S. sales chief, Lawenda — a veteran TV sales exec who’s worked at Univision, Viacom and Turner Broadcasting — steps into the role vacated by Tom Arrix in July.

Social media-savvy broadcasters have developed strategies and best practices for exploiting Facebook and Twitter to generate higher ratings and more revenue.

This week, Facebook says it will begin sending weekly reports to ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, offering a glimpse of how much chatter their shows are generating on the social network. The reports will reveal how many “actions” — likes, comments, or shares — a television episode has inspired on Facebook and how many members participated in an action.

Modern Family just launched in syndication on USA Network, a big win for the cable network that’s not usually known for it’s comedy. If you’ve never seen Modern Family, or heard of the hit show you might not even know it’s only a syndication launch with the network’s smart, social-TV savvy launch strategy. Here are the details.