New findings produced by SecondSync – the UK’s leading social TV analytics provider – in partnership with Facebook today provides a unique picture of how socially connected consumers in the US, UK and Australia watch TV programmes and engage in social chatter.

With peoples’ online activity increasingly switching between devices and Facebook interaction moving to mobile, the report findings will help improve decision-making for brands and marketers around when and how to reach audiences watching TV.

The Watching with Friends: How TV drives conversation on Facebook report draws on aggregated and anonymised data to protect privacy. Key findings from the analysis of real-time patterns and types of engagement include:

Real-time interactions: TV-related Facebook interactions happen during the show airing.
Widespread reach: The scale of TV-related chatter seen on Facebook corresponds to the broad reach of the social network. Shows such as the Sound of Music Live and Breaking Bad generate 7.34 million and 4.47 million audience interactions respectively.
Mobile engagement: 80% of TV-related chatter on Facebook is generated from mobile devices.
Multiple interaction opportunities. Posts are most closely aligned to real-time TV ‘events’; the bulk of TV conversations are contained in Comments; Likes have a long tail of engagement.
The findings indicate opportunities available for brands and marketers to deliver relevant content, informed by real-time insight around peoples' behaviour on Facebook.

Andy Littledale, Managing Director of SecondSync, said:
“This is the biggest release of Facebook social TV data to date. Our analysis, using SecondSync’s social listening technology and social TV expertise, provides an additional perspective on social TV behaviour, one that draws on Facebook’s rich demographics and broad reach. We are looking forward to working with Facebook to bring this data to market, initially in the UK and US.”

Fred Leach, Facebook's Head of Measurement R&D and Partnerships, said:
"The Watching with Friends paper offers a fascinating insight into how people use Facebook to talk about TV, offering a first glimpse into the scale and longevity of discussion before, during, and after the broadcast. This has valuable marketing implications, demonstrating trends by demographic and how mobile has become the key method of engagement. Marketers have been asking us for these insights, and we look forward to working with SecondSync to showcase more in this area"

Julie DeTraglia, Senior Vice President, Digital and Broadcast Marketing Research, NBCUniversal, said:
“In recent years, tracking TV-related social media conversations has become an important component of our audience research. However, up until now we had no visibility into the ways people were engaging with our shows on Facebook, a broad social platform with tremendous scale.  Having access to this new data will allow us to plan our social strategy more effectively and potentially help us understand how social conversations may affect ratings.”

The report, Watching With Friends: How TV drives conversation on Facebook, is available here: www.secondsync.com