What drives TV online engagement? The influence of social strategies and contents

Improving the online engagement of TV viewers has become a major goal for broadcasters. Social TV strategies, such as showing a hashtag on the first screen, are commonly used to this goal. However, online engagement is a complex phenomenon. Viewers may increase online engagement because of social strategies, but engagement may be also influenced by the current TV content. In addition, an increase in online engagement may be a simple effect of an increase in viewership. We aim at disentangling this phenomenon. To this aim we analyzed the effect of social TV strategies and type of TV content in a major Italian TV show. We measured the relationship between the TV show viewers' activity on Twitter and the TV show characteristics minute by minute through multiple linear regression models. In order to control the effect of viewership, we performed the statistical analyses both during the show (viewership increases or keeps constant) and during the commercial breaks (viewership decreases). This paper presents the preliminary results. Our findings question the hypothesis that social TV strategies affect online engagement, while support the hypothesis that engagement is mainly driven by the type of TV content.