Study Finds Twitter Not Relevant In TV Marketing #StopTheHashtagsOnMyTV

By Peter Sciretta/Sept. 4, 2014 11:00 am EST

You're watching your favorite television show and an annoying hashtag pops up in the right hand corner. As they go to commercial, a promo reminds you to use a certain hashtag when discussing the episode on the microblogging service. How many times does this happen to you? Its a daily annoyance during my television viewing, which most of the time is time shifted making hashtags for live social discussion rather pointless. Well it turns out a new study has concluded that these annoying pushes for social media engagement and buzz might be a complete waste and ineffective. The study finds that "strategies heavily focused on this would be a big waste as it's irrelevant to over 80 percent of TV viewers." Find out more about the tv twitter hashtags study results, after the jump.

TV Twitter Hashtags Study Findings

Only ?18 percent of people with Internet access follow TV shows on Twitter while they watch them. Research and forecasting firm Strategy Analytics has identified six main types of tv viewers (based on how connected devices come into play during their viewing behavior):

33 percent of people are now traditional "couch potatoes": "Very focused on TV when watching it, they never phone or text people about what they're watching and hardly ever use social media. None of this group uses Twitter trending topics or hashtags on a weekly basis to follow a show they're watching."

26 percent are OTTers (a name derived from "over-the-top" or online TV services) who are less interested in TV, most likely to go over a day without watching TV in traditional ways — they prefer to watch shows time shifted online.

12 percent are "Couch chatterers", who are like couch potatoes but are 2.5 times more likely than the average person to call, text or tweet others about what they're watching. As with couch potatoes, this group doesn't use Twitter to follow a show they're watching but are more likely to be using another device when watching TV than the average viewer.

30 percent of people are "multi-screeners", which the study splits into three groups:

45 percent are "Moderate multi-screeners", they view television on computers, tablets or smartphones and they're extremely likely to phone/text about a show but only 1 percent of them use Twitter to follow a show.

11 per cent of people are "Indifferent" and "moderate" multi-screeners who watch TV while online. 83 percent of "indifferent multi-screeners" are highly likely to phone or text people about what they're watching, and 91 percent use Twitter to follow a television show.

7 percent are "Manic multi-screeners" are the most likely to use another device whilst watching TV, the most likely to phone/text about a show and they also use Twitter on a regular basis to follow a show.

The study was conducted by Strategy Analytics using data from more than 6,000 consumers online in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France and Italy.?