Commercial Breaks aren’t Tweet Breaks

  TV is becoming more social every day. We know viewers tweet during live TV, but there’s still much to learn about the relationship between TV viewing and social media usage. For example, are people tweeting while a show unfolds—during the actual minutes of a program—or are they reserving their Tweets for the commercial breaks?

Looking at the results of a new SocialGuide study, viewers send the majority of their Tweets during program time rather than during commercial time. The study also found that the share of Tweets sent during commercial time was driven across genres by the share of commercial time within a program’s airtime. In sports, for example, commercials ran during 24 percent of airtime, and 25 percent of Tweets were sent during commercial time. Highlights from the study, which analyzed 59 U.S. TV episodes across broadcast and cable, are below.