Twitter activity and audience rating for episode

From 30th of August 2012 to 30th June 2013 we collected 2,489,669 observations by querying the Twitter Firehose for Tweets containing at last one of the following hashtags: #ballarò or #ballaro, #portaaporta, #agorarai, #ultimaparola, #serviziopubblico, #inmezzora, #infedele or #linfedele, #ottoemezzo, #omnibus, #inonda, #piazzapulita.

All the selected hashtags are either official (e.g. advertised on the official Twitter channel of the program or during the TV show) or the most frequently used hashtag related to one of the eleven political talk shows aired by the Italian free-to-air broadcasters during season 2012/2013.
The dataset was acquired via DiscoverText GNIP importer. In other terms, this dataset is a complete collection of all the Tweets related to the political talk shows TV genre during the entire season 2012/2013.

From this raw dataset we extracted 1,889,585 observations (76% of the whole dataset) corresponding to Tweets created during the airtime (plus 15 minutes) of each episode (N=1,077) of the shows. For each aired episode we extracted the following metrics: number of Tweets created during the airtime, the number or replies, reTweet and original Tweets - Tweet-(ReTweet+Reply) -, the number of unique contributors, the reach (total sum of followers for each non unique contributors), the average rate of Tweets (TPM) and contributors (CPM) per minute, the ratio between unique contributors and average audience. For each episode, we also collected the average audience and rating as estimated by Auditel.

The process is described at https://medium.com/next-media-society/58d824ac26c6. A working paper with even more details is available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2306512.