24% of U.S. Adults Use Social Media to Comment on TV Shows
TV viewing and online social interactions are linked for 23.9 percent of U.S. adult internet users, according to brand strategy and marketing company Ring Digital. That's the percentage of people who say they have voted, posted, shared, or commented on a TV show on social media in the past month. Only 9.0 percent say they do so frequently, however, suggesting that multitasking in front of the TV isn’t all that popular.
Of the few people who turn to social networks while watching TV, the vast majority—71.6 percent—posted to Facebook. That was followed by 33.8 percent commenting on YouTube, 32.0 percent on Instagram, and 29.0 percent on Snapchat. What about Twitter, which seems tailor-made for live TV commenting? Only 23.5 percent of the already small group who turns to social media to talk about TV uses Twitter. That's a decline of 0.4 percent in the past 6 months, the report says.
Another surprise in the report is that commenting on sports is on the decline. While Twitter's trending topics are full of sports subjects whenever a game is on, Ring Digital finds that the percentage of people commenting on sports programming has declined steadily for the past year-and-a-half. Viewers were more likely to comment on news or drama.
The numbers cited here come from Google and Survata surveys conducted in March. For more data, download "The Social TV Index, 6th Edition" for free (registration required).
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