Twitter Use During TV: A Full-Season Analysis of #serviziopubblico Hashtag

Abstract

Several recent reports pointed out how the practice of using a “second screen” while following a television program is becoming an increasingly widespread phenomenon. When the secondary device is used to read or to comment about a watched program, most of the discussion takes place on popular social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Previous research has shown that the analysis of these contents could lead to a better understanding of the behavior of networked publics and of the structure of the show itself. Nevertheless most of the existing research is focused on the content only and focused on a single episode analysis or on big media events. Leveraging this background, this article presents instead a study focused on the relationships between content and users across an entire airing season of a TV program. Through a quantitative network analysis of the tweets produced during 25 episodes of the Italian political talks show Servizio Pubblico, we identified a small loyal group of viewers. Despite the differences in quantity of content produced, the loyal viewers do not show any sign of forming a community-like structure. We also performed a qualitative analysis of the tweets produced during one specific episode and discussed the elements of the TV show that generated the higher level of engagement on Twitter.