Twitter and TV are in it Together

October 26, 2011 | 65 Comments

Audience members are now able to vote for their favorite contestants on the new FOX show “The X Factor” via Twitter, according to The New York Times.

Simon Cowell, the producer of the television show, already uses Twitter to get feedback from the audience members by the comments they make. However, now people just have to message the shows Twitter page to cast their vote. The live voting will begin on Nov. 2.

Twitter has agreed to the new voting option because of the relationship they share with the television industry. According the The New York Times, “The X Factor” has given its new partners free promotions and advertisements on the show to boost the number of users on the website.

Chloe Sladden, an employee at Twitter, was hired specifically to bridge the gap between Twitter and TV. Sladden helped Twitter not only form an agreement with “The X Factor” but also helped form an agreement with The Weather Channel back in August that provides weather-related tweets to the television channel.

Social TV is meant to increase the number of viewers for TV shows so people can react to it more quickly.

The New York Times quoted Cowell as saying, “The only powerful people now on TV are the people on Twitter and Facebook.”

65 thoughts on “Twitter and TV are in it Together”

Phillip Martin on October 26, 2011 1:41 pm
Voting by Twitter.
I thought it was really innovative at first when American Idol had voting by cell phones, but this really shows how social networking is changing things today. Really interesting!
Sara Shipley Hiles on October 30, 2011 12:42 pm
Nice post! Good job with attribution. Good links.

One error: shows should be possessive:
“However, now people just have to message the show’s Twitter page to cast their vote.”