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News | | Twitter looks to Symphony Advanced Media to track ‘Mobiletasking’ behavior

Twitter looks to Symphony Advanced Media to track ‘Mobiletasking’ behavior

Spending time on a smartphone while watching television – a behavior called mobiletasking – has become the norm today. For companies like Twitter, knowing what effect this has on advertisers is vital to understanding the second screen experience for audiences, marketers and networks. To better identify the outcome of using the social network while viewing commercials, a research team at Twitter looked to Symphony Advanced Media (SymphonyAM), which passively tracks the media usage of thousands of people.

From this data, Twitter found that its use while watching TV decreases an audience member’s likelihood to change the channel during ads. According to SymphonyAM’s analysis,
“TV viewers who are not multi-tasking on mobile devices tune away 17% of the time during ad breaks. This number drops to 13% when TV viewers are in fact multi-tasking on their phones. Among Twitter users, however, tune-away is the lowest: 8%. When viewers are on Twitter, they are more likely to view a brand’s TV spot.” (Twitter blog post)
Analyzing people’s activities on Twitter isn’t the only thing SymphonyAM is up to. Earlier this month, they conducted research on mobiletasking and searchtasking activities happening during the SuperBowlXLVIII. Learn more about their findings here: www.symphonyam.com/blog.