Twitter has become the “social soundtrack” of TV

Twitter has become the “social soundtrack” of TV because it’s a new media company that’s comfortable with old media, CEO Dick Costolo said Tuesday.

“We absolutely view it as complementary and view it as an additive world – not a world where you have to take a piece out,” Costolo said at Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference in Phoenix.

TV has always been social – whether it was families gathered around their TVs or co-workers discussing the previous night’s shows – and the social chatter surrounding TV broadcasts fits in with that tradition, Costolo said.

Right now, Twitter is the only public real-time distributed conversational platform, and TV programmers are integrating hashtags and social conversations into their shows.

Twitter also has the ability to extend the reach of television, with the number of tweets about specific shows multiplying as much as 100 times during first-run broadcasts, Costolo said.

“And when a show ends there’s a long tail, hours and hours long, of conversation on the show,” he said. Read more http://www.consumer360.com/twitter-ceo-were-the-social-soundtrack-of-tv-by-design/