Social TV activation strategies on Twitter of the most popular shows on European general-interest television

Abstract

The main objective of this research focuses on the interaction between the traditional television industry with its social audience through Twitter. For this purpose, we present a content analysis of the official Twitter accounts from the programmes with the highest audience belonging to 26 open general-interest channels in the five largest European markets (Germany, Italy, UK, France and Spain). Tweets published in the official accounts of the TV programs that make our sample were collected through API access and specific software. The specific objectives of the study involve the knowledge of the forms, social tv activation strategies, content and typologies of the publications in the accounts of these programmes belonging to the three main pillars of television schedules (fiction, info-show and information) and also in the divergences and similarities that exist between the general-interest channels depending on the country, the ownership and the genre. From our results, we conclude that there is a low level of interest, albeit unequal among countries, by the most popular programmes to interact with their social audience on Twitter.