So this is how you trash talk in 140 characters or less.
Twitter, which is competing with Facebook for TV show ad dollars, has been talking down its rival’s audience as older and less hip than its young adopters in its pitches to Madison Avenue, according to media and ad execs.
Given that Facebook’s user base is bigger than Twitter by several orders of magnitude, it seems like it could crush Facebook in the competition for TV dollars. The newly public Twitter has just 49 million monthly active users versus Facebook’s 198 million.
Indeed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his team have responded by scoffing at Twitter’s size.
“There’s been some trash-talking,” said TV executive. “Facebook says, ‘Hey, Twitter sounds great, but they’re a fifth of our size.’”
Facebook also generates many times the TV chatter at Twitter. For instance, CBS’s “NCIS” has 17.8 million fans on Facebook, but only 535,000 followers on Twitter, according to social media measurement firm ListenFirst Media.
Nevertheless, Twitter is counting on youth-obsessed advertisers who are confronting a rapidly aging TV audience to be receptive to the notion that hashtags can equal higher ratings.
Nowhere was that more evident than SyFy’s campy “Sharknado,” which generated a whirlwind 5,000 tweets per minute during its peak and created a phenomenon.
Facebook is testing a system that will allow developers to view public posts and search for mentions to figure out what a particular target audience, such as women ages 25-to-54 years old, are buzzing about.
The world’s largest social media network is also working on a new metric that aims to correlate online chatter and TV viewing.