Twitter

As part of a broader effort to help users, brands and publishers to connect more closely, Twitter has agreed to buy SnappyTV, which powers a popular platform for the live-clipping, editing and distribution of video across the Web.

This past TV season saw many programs launch beyond the screens we watched them on through social media. TV moments became thousands of messages on Twitter within seconds, with the energy of engaged fan bases, the influence of program stars and press, and the quick creativity of advertisers amplifying posts to millions of people engaged on Twitter.

Human, bot or something in between? Nieman Journalism Lab asked ABC News, The Associated Press, CNN, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal how they power their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Omnicom Media Group announced Tuesday a first-of-its-kind deal with Twitter that integrates the agency’s programmatic ad-buying unit Accuen with the social network’s mobile ad exchange MoPub, which reaches more than 1 billion devices a month. The two-year deal, worth $230 million, will strengthen the social site’s global position.

NEW YORK (AP) – Stephen Colbert is done with the “Colbert Report” Twitter account. He teamed with one of Twitter’s founders, Biz Stone, on Monday’s show to symbolically blow up […]

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Comedian Chelsea Handler drew accusations of racism after she was invited to take over The Huffington Post’s Twitter account during Sunday night’s Oscars and repeatedly touted […]

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Ellen DeGeneres’ goal of setting a retweet record with her star-studded selfie was achieved before the Oscars telecast was even over. During a comic bit, the […]

Twitter has just secured another of its Amplify ad deals, this time with ABC, the last of the four major broadcast networks to sign up. The partnership will begin on Sunday night during the Oscars, with Samsung as the sponsor of a series of 10 promoted tweets featuring celebrity selfies taken from the green room, sent from the account of @TheAcademy.

Twitter and CNN have teamed up with Dataminr to launch Dataminr for News, a new alert system that promises to help newsrooms quickly and accurately identify breaking news and verifiable sources on Twitter.

The micro-blogging giant’s managing director of global brand and agency strategy predicts that growing social media usage will have a direct effect as soon as this spring.

In Brimingham, Ala., Allbritton Communications’ ABC affiliate WBMA-LD (and its two full-power satellites WCFT Tuscaloosa and WJSU Anniston) is finding success with its social media strategy. The station, known as ABC 33/40, has three detailed social media plans: one for every day, one for breaking news and one for severe weather. The strategy has the station just shy of 40,000 Twitter followers and 100,000 Facebook fans

Twitter has grand ambitions as an ad platform, and it appears poised to make a foray into the lucrative but fragmented world of local advertising with its new map-based feature called Nearby. While the company says it is merely an experiment, agency execs believe it could help the company compete with Foursquare, Google and Yelp for local advertising dollars.

The binge-watching, recapping, Scandal-tweeting nature of the new television culture marks the small screen’s shift into both high art and blood sport.

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.

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.

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.

Top entertainment stars are becoming the social darlings of real-time tweeting, but local news personalities are now trying to catch up. KCAL Los Angeles reporter Melanie Woodrow live-tweeted her Nov. 5 report on human trafficking, tweeting out questions and comments to her followers, and in the process, gaining 11 times her daily average of new Twitter followers, according to Twitter data.

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).

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.

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.

In a bid to reinforce Twitter’s mutually beneficial relationships with the news industry, the social networking giant on Thursday appointed Vivian Schiller to a newly created position, head of news and journalism partnerships. Schiller, the chief digital officer for NBC News, will leave NBC and join Twitter in January. At Twitter, she will oversee partnerships with news organizations like NBC, NPR and the New York Times; she worked for all three organizations earlier in her career.

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.

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.

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.

The company’s new product, Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings, professes to measure the activity and reach of Twitter conversation about shows.

As Twitter prepares for its initial public offering, the San Francisco-based company is also working hard to insert itself into the TV advertising economy. In recent months, the social networking company has forged partnerships with television content owners such as CBS, MTV and the NFL through a program it calls Amplify.

Facebook and Twitter are vying to become the nation’s digital water cooler as they woo networks and advertisers.