Twitter

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. said rumors about the company’s interest in buying microblogging site Twitter Inc. or building a stake in it were untrue. Twitter’s shares, which rose as much as 14% on Wednesday, pared some gains and closed up 4.1% at $17.38.

The NBC awards ceremony generates more than 1.75 million total tweets, No. 1 for the week among all TV telecasts.

This past week of the top 10 in Nielsen’s Twitter TV Ratings of sports events, the No. 1 spot went to the 2015 NBA championship rematch of the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors. The game had 506,000 event-related Tweets sent in the U.S., with a unique audience of 6.7 million people. According to Nielsen, live tweeting makes up 57% of the weekly Twitter TV impressions, showing that social engagement peaks during a broadcast.

The three most important words in broadcasting are “news,” “video” and “live.” The industry can emphasize its relationship to these words and values by making them a central component of our Web identity. 

Taking a page from trend-setter Donald Trump, CBS News announced this morning it’s entered into a partnership with Twitter to create an “enhanced viewer experience” for its Nov. 14 Democratic debate.

Twitter is making it easier for marketers to buy ads by introducing what is essentially an automated marketplace, or ad network, for pre-roll video ads.

“Identifying and cultivating relationships with loyal authors could be powerful for TV networks and advertisers as they each look to maximize earned media driven by TV content and advertising,” according to Nielsen.

Users can now send up to 10,000 characters on private messages sent through Twitter, a fair amount more than the 140-character limit they’ve faced to this point. Twitter says this was a response to the company’s No. 1 request for changes.

A two-year content and advertising deal announced Monday expands upon similar partnerships that Twitter forged with the NFL in 2013 and 2014. The NFL plans to funnel nearly three times more content into Twitter than last year, a commitment that will include more video highlights and pictures from games in progress. Twitter, in turn, will use an automated formula to prominently display NFL tweets and related ads in the streams of accountholders likely to enjoy the information.

The share of Americans for whom Twitter and Facebook serve as a source of news is continuing to rise. This rise comes primarily from more current users encountering news there rather than large increases in the user base overall, according to findings from a new survey by the Pew Research Center. The report also finds that users turn to each of these prominent social networks to fulfill different types of information needs.

A controversial end to the fifth season of HBO’s Game of Thrones led to huge ratings, and viewers also took to Twitter to sound off. Sunday night’s episode generated 436,000 total tweets three hours before, during and three hours after the episode, according to Nielsen Social, up 79% from 243,000 tweets for the season four finale on the same night a year ago.

Twitter is now ready to serve autoplay video, which has the potential to change up the experience on the platform with richer and more engaging media.  The company says it has taken a hard stance in one important area that could give it an advantage over rivals in social video: viewability standards. It is promising only to charge on video ads that have been seen 100 percent in full view of the user.

Nielsen is releasing a report on television-related Twitter activity in the U.S. from Sept. 1, 2014 through May 24, 2015. And while CBS consistently tops the weekly Nielsen ratings for viewers, it’s an also-ran when it comes to Twitter.

If you spend a fair bit of time on Twitter, you can’t have failed to stumble across users who have a blue tickmark next to their names. These are the Verified Users. There are around 150,000 verified Twitter accounts in total, and according to Twitter, and 25% of them are journalists.

Twitter has been engaged in an ongoing series of talks to acquire Flipboard, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation, in an all-stock deal that would value the company at more than $1 billion.

Twitter is checking the boxes on a modern online video service’s basic features. It has begun letting people upload videos on mobile, started testing autoplay videos to induce people to watch clips that pop up in their feeds and made those videos embeddable on others’ sites to get them in front of more people. Now it plans to try out a way to get people who watch one video to check out more.

Friday morning, a new hashtag debuted — #foxflashbackfriday — created by several Fox-owned stations based on the popularity of the hashtag #flashbackfriday #foxflashbackfriday trended during the day in Twitter’s top-five […]

LOS ANGELES (AP) — HBO’s “Game of Thrones” has the dubious honor of being popular with both pirates and viewers. After its fifth season began Sunday, users of a Twitter-owned […]

HBO’s fantasy drama Game of Thrones continues to build its popularity, at least judging by Twitter activity. Sunday’s season-five premiere of Thrones generated a unique Twitter audience of 5.98 million, according to Nielsen Social, or the number of accounts that saw at least one tweet about the episode. That was up 33% from the same night last year, when Thrones had a Twitter audience of 4.51 million. The show was also up slightly year-to-year in total tweets, rising 6% from 250,000 to 265,000.

The season-ender generates 2.39 million total tweets, or about seven times more than its closest competitor last week, AMC’s The Walking Dead.

Twitter has quickly become the modern water cooler for TV audiences, but it’s also proven to be a viable tool for networks seeking to drive audience tune-in and advertisers looking to amplify brand messaging beyond TV. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, recent Nielsen research found that Twitter TV volumes can tell them more than just who’s reacting to TV on Twitter—they can also tell how engaged general viewing audiences are with the shows they watch.

Twitter users jumped at the rare opportunity to mock the longtime newsman, many using the hashtag #BrianWilliamsMisremembers.

Nielsen says adding deeper social media Twitter data to a new predictive TV program promotion model can help TV executives and advertising executives better determine which shows will succeed. Using two variables — promotion activity and Twitter activity — Nielsen’s new model significantly improves the accuracy of whether a broadcast or cable show will succeed — 65% versus 48%.

Most Twitter conversations around television happen during the live broadcast, during the event whether it’s the finale of Sons of Anarchy or a good football game. Brands though, are starting to run campaigns to extend that liveness to before and after the event.

Social TV is no longer a new phenomenon. Millions of people take to Twitter to share their passions about their favorite programming in the heat of the moment — as the moments happen. While the majority of the conversations happen during live broadcasts, as networks look to boost fan engagement and build program audiences, networks and agencies can now quantify how much of the discussion happens outside of the live airing window for more than 650 English and Spanish language programs.

New research from Ipsos indicates that Twitter users are more likely to have a pay-TV subscription, and more likely to watch traditional TV, than people who don’t use the service. Ipsos says 93% of Twitter users have a pay TV subscription, compared to 86% of non-Twitter users.

The FTC doesn’t think that Sony’s claims that its PlayStation Vita was game changing were accurate. Sony Computer Entertainment America has agreed to settle FTC charges that it deceived consumers with false ad claims about the “game changing” technological features of Vita during its U.S. launch campaign in late 2011 and early 2012. The FTC also targeted ad agency Deutsch for both its traditional advertising and a social media effort. In fact, the FTC said this is the first its charged any agency or company with deceptive conduct related to Twitter posts.

Scandal star Kerry Washington made a suggestion to creator Shonda Rhimes when Scandal debuted in 2012: Get the cast to religiously use Twitter to generate buzz. Rhimes quickly sent out an email to her tightknit crew to crank up the social media. A phenomenon was born that got the attention of the network’s top brass and Hollywood’s television industry.

Less than a year after launching its small news division, Twitter is reenforcing early signs that its endgame is to be a tool, not a competitor, to other news sources. In that spirit, Vivian Schiller, Twitter’s head of news, led a panel at the Online News Association’s annual conference on Thursday aiming to highlight the latest in an ever-evolving set of best practices for newsrooms using the social platform.

When it comes to delivering a Twitter audience, the NFL beats the rest of the primetime schedule and it’s pretty much a blowout. Last Thursday’s premiere NFL game of the 2014 season, between the Green Bay Packers and Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks, generated close to 950,000 tweets. And those tweets were seen by over 8 million fans, according to the latest Nielsen Twitter TV Rankings report.

Twitter shares leapt more than 25% in after-hours trading Tuesday after stellar results in the company’s latest quarterly earnings report. Twitter added 16 million monthly active users to bring its total to 271 million, the biggest period of user growth since the first quarter of 2013. Revenue for the quarter was $312 million, blowing past analysts’ estimates of $283 million.

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Nervous Brazilian soccer fans took to Twitter to breathe a collective sigh of relief as the final, tension-filled moments of a penalty shootout against Chile […]

While some critics argue the second screen experience of looking at a device while a show is on serves to distract viewers, networks see nothing but an upside. Here are some insight into hashtags and while watching TV: