By now, most everyone has heard about The Voice. If you haven’t watched it, you have been missing out. One thing that makes this different than the other reality shows is it has a lot of focus on Social Media.

Twitter is highly used. There are 4 coaches. Each coach has their Twitter account. There are also 4 assistants to these coaches. They have their own Twitter accounts. There are 4 teams. Each team has a Twitter account. There are 32 people that made it on to one of the teams. Each person has a Twitter account. Finally, there is the host, Carson Daly, and the in-show and online correspondent, Alison Haislip. And yes, each of them have a Twitter account. In all, there are 46 Twitter accounts … make that 47 Twitter accounts. The show itself has one.

Then there is Facebook. It looks like each coach has a Facebook page, each artist has a Facebook page, Alison Haislip has one and there is the main one for the show. This make 38 Facebook pages.

How does this relate to advertising? By using Twitter and Facebook, they are actively involving the fans of the show throughout the week. This helps build up excitement for the shows, which in turn means more live viewers. More live viewers means more people not able to fast forward past the television commercials. Has it been working? Take a look at the week ending of May 8th ratings (link to ratings). The top 4 were reality shows. The Voice was number 3.

When you have almost 7.5 million viewers in the 18-49 age range watching, you can get premium advertising dollars from companies.

Now let’s take a look at one of the original reality shows. Survivor. It is still bringing in ratings. If you take a look at the My 8th ratings, you’ll see it was number 15. This season the show is getting into social media. The Emmy Award-winning host, Jeff Probst, has an “Interactive Living Room” each week during the live broadcast. He comments on the show as it is airing using his Twitter account. He also started a blog site (www.jeffprobst.com). Once again, this gets people watching the show live.

Although Reality TV is doing this more, even Scripted TV has begun to take advantage of Twitter. Dana Delany has tweeted during the airing of her show, Body of Proof. Other shows have done this too (No Ordinary Family, Blue Bloods, etc.).

What makes Twitter a great medium is the fans of the shows have easy access to interact. Smart phones, iPads, laptops, etc. all make it easy to be sitting in the living room with the television on and still be able to participate in a Twitter conversation. Incorporating Twitter into a television event simply and significantly increases audience engagement. A Nielsen and Yahoo! joint study found late last year that 86% of mobile Internet users use a mobile device while watching TV — social-networking, texting, browsing for related or unrelated content.

Advertisers are sure to be watching this. More and more ads will include hashtags, start conversations and seek true consumer involvement, extending the story beyond the thirty-second spot.

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