The series finale of "Breaking Bad" was a conversation starter for days after it aired—and if you turned to Twitter to analyze the ending, you weren't alone. According to TV ratings firm Nielsen, the show was the subject of 1.2 million tweets that reached some 9.3 million Twitter users. That's quite a reach.
Nielsen is starting to look at Twitter data to gauge the social media impact of television shows. The effort was first announced last December, but Nielsen didn't release its first Twitter TV Ratings report until Monday. The results weren't that surprising: tweets about TV have increased by 38 percent year-over-year, from 190 million to 263 million. TV events like the "Breaking Bad" finale or controversial shows, like an episode of "Jimmy Kimmel Live" that sparked a Twitter war between Kimmel and Kanye West, cause a wave of social buzz.
Those tweets in turn reach a large audience. Nielsen on its social intelligence platform estimated that tweets reach an audience 50 times larger than the base of authors. If 2,000 people tweeted about "Breaking Bad," 100,000 people saw those tweets.
Twitter is clearly hoping that big brands will choose to advertise on the network to reach such a large audience. Its Amplify program pushes Promoted Tweets from a given show's advertisers to users who are tweeting about that show. Those Promoted Tweets have to be compelling enough to click on, because Twitter only gets paid when users engage with ads.
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