[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

Nielsen and Twitter have inked an exclusive multi-year agreement to create the ‘Nielsen Twitter TV Rating’ for the US market. Under this agreement, Nielsen and Twitter will deliver a syndicated-standard metric around the reach of the TV conversation on Twitter, slated for commercial availability at the start of the fall 2013 TV season.

TV viewers discuss TV on Twitter, creating a new dynamic between audiences and programming. The service’s more than 140 million active users send one billion Tweets every two and a half days, the vast majority of which is public and conversational, making Twitter data important in producing standardized metrics representing online and mobile conversations about television.

Chloe Sladden (Vice president, Media, Twitter): Twitter has become the world’s digital water cooler, where conversations about TV happen in real time.

The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating will serve to complement Nielsen’s existing TV ratings. These ratings will build on top of NM Incite’s SocialGuide audience engagement analytics platform.

NM Incite is a joint venture between Nielsen and McKinsey & Co., and the hub of Nielsen’s social media analytics efforts. SocialGuide, recently acquired by Nielsen and NM Incite, currently captures Twitter TV activity for all U.S. programming across 234 TV channels in English and Spanish, and more than 36,000 programs. Through a  classification process, SocialGuide matches Tweets to TV programs, and can offer social TV metrics including the number of unique Tweets associated with a given program and rankings for the most social TV programs.