Social data analytics platform 4C released a study, commissioned by Facebook, ranking television show and genre popularity among consumers of various product categories. The research was the result of the company’s data science team combing Facebook for publicly available user behavior data.
While some results were unsurprising — the strongest link for alcohol brand audiences is with SportsCenter — less predictable results included users engaged with financial services brands seeming to prefer reality TV. Download the report.
The research—what 4C calls “affinity” data—is aimed at allowing media buyers, TV media planners, and networks to leverage social media activity for their advertising strategies. The company assigns each show a “4C Score,” a relative score on a 0-100 scale of how receptive a brand’s followers might be to a certain show or vice versa.
The study was commissioned by Facebook, which wants to increase the effectiveness of its user data for TV audience analytics. It’s why the company also partnered with Neilsen’s Cross-Platform Campaign Ratings (XCR) tool in an effort to measure the link between Facebook and TV audience reach.
“[Brands] want to understand what reach they are getting on TV what reach they are getting on Facebook and how they overlap,” said Rob Creekmore, advertising research manager at Facebook. “What they care about is real business objectives—not likes, not comments, not shares, but moving product off shelves.”
Analyzing the data goes beyond “scraping” user profiles, the company said. 4C claims to include over one billion Facebook profiles and 200,000 Facebook brand pages as targets for its analytics, and has the ability to analyze activity at the individual user level by measuring the relative strength of connections between brands and TV shows/genres.
The study is an offshoot of what 4C is trying to accomplish with its Sonar analytics platform. “Social networks are the largest set of least-biased observational data that has ever existed,” said 4C CEO Lance Neuhauser, “it should be used as business intelligence fuel.”
Neuhauser believes the early focus of brands on social media was too focused on likes, followers, and other areas he thinks are superficial compared to the conclusions that 4C is drawing from activity. The company needs to “get folks to see the value in this type of intelligence,” he said, “to go well-beyond a ‘like’.”
In January, 4C raised $5 million in Series B funding.
