Twitter has just released initial findings about the impacts of advertisers' Promoted Tweet campaigns on brand metrics.

Results from the study show that people viewing Promoted Tweets leads to increases in message association, brand favourability and purchase intent. For example, people exposed to a Promoted Tweet show a 22% average increase in message association than those not exposed. Thus even when viewers do not ‘engage’ e.g. click on a link within the tweet, there is still a benefit. This is despite Promoted Tweets being priced on a cost-per-engagement basis.

Other measures show that brand favourability among people who engage increases by 30%, whilst people exposed to multiple Promoted Tweets increase their brand favourability by a further 10%. Among those who engage, 53% show a lift in purchase intent.

This last statistic will be of most interest to many brands, particularly from the FMCG category. It contrasts with our own Social Media Behaviour Index (SMBI) which shows that on average, 73% of people who post a positive comment on a brand’s Facebook page intend to purchase from the brand. In all, our SMBI looks at five measures across the purchase funnel, and five measures around advocacy, across six brand categories.

Just three weeks ago the EU recommended that the law around fishing discards be reformed. We imagine that Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall will be particularly chuffed, after his "Fish Fight" campaign (aired on Channel Four last year) brought the issue the public eye. Hugh is back with a new series, with yesterday night's episode encouraging viewers who shopped at Tesco, Co-op and Morrisons to tweet their supermarket clarifying where farmed prawns' food was sourced from.

We estimate that an impressive 4% of viewers followed the show's call-to-action, with Tesco shoppers apparently the most concerned as the supermarket garnered notably more tweets than competitors Co-op or Morrisons.

Whether this higher volume is due to their larger customer base, or elevated concerns around transparency in the food sourcing chain (as the below tweet highlights) is up for speculation.

Food supply chain horrors do not stop at meat. Disturbing news on what prawns from Thai fish farms r fed. Tesco comment? @uktesco #fishfight

— Phil (@bilks) February 28, 2013

The retailer have yet to issue an offical response at the time of writing, although they did state that they are working towards improvement in a tweet. Morrisons, whose brand image actually improved in light of the horsemeat scandal have offered an offical response on their website also pledging improvement, while Co-Op have actually changed their policy to ensure supplies in spring/summer will be from accredited sources.

Not bad for a handful of tweets on a Thursday night.

Yesterday night the curtain closed on the 85th Academy Awards, officially drawing the two-month long run of awards around music and film to a finish. They were peppered with proud moments, like Daniel Day Lewis’ third Best Actor scoop making Oscar history, well as more confusing ones, like Prince actually endorsing Gotye’s music. But some of the most skilled performers out there are the hosts themselves. It falls to them carry the show through and make it at the least watchable, at the most memorable (and with the advent of Twitter integrating with TV ratings, mentionable).

Looking back over the Oscars, Golden Globes, Grammys, BAFTAS and Brit Awards, we conducted sentiment analysis on Twitter to find out who really is the "Host with the Most". We felt that only human analysis was relevant for this kind of project as it was essential we accurately accounted for sarcasm and cultural references. For each host we divided up a random sample of tweets that mention the host into positive, negative, or neutral (neutral tweets are those that mentioned the host, but didn’t express a specific opinion). The score was calculated by subtracting share of negative from positive, then dividing that by the number of neutral to create a host score. The results are below:

Perhaps it's no surprise that British national treasure and avid tweeter Stephen Fry took the top spot, although Tina Fey’s performance at the Golden Globes comes a very close second. Although Fry’s efforts provoked the most opinionated response of any individual, not all of it was positive, with 23% of the total taking a dislike to the presenter (especially in the last half of the show). In contrast to Fry, barely a bad word was said about comedy queens and off-screen best friends Amy Poelher and Tina Fey, with less than 1% of tweets analysed ending up the negative pile. Our score also rewards presenters for having garnered engaged tweets that express an opinion; had we been scoring solely on positive mentions then Tina Fey would have been number one. The below looks at the share of positive, negative and neutral tweets each presenter received.

Digging a little deeper, we took a new sample of tweets that mentioned both Amy Poehler and Tina Fey as a duo. This causes the scoreboard to shift; the two together literally double Fry’s score.

What makes the host with the most?

Fey and Poelher have a long, long history of working together, which probably goes a way to creating the dynamic that made them such a hit when hosting. But it could also be that double-acts are more popular. Would the BAFTAs have trumped the Globes hosts if Fry had a partner to bounce off, as one Tweeter suggested?

Wish Stephen Fry and Billy Connolly had presented the BAFTAs as a double act #AGirlCanDream

— Bethany Creamer (@BethanyCreamer) February 10, 2013

The Oscars has had co-hosts before, but the last two times met with poor reception. James Franco and Anne Hathaway's 2011 presentation was poorly received, as was Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin's try the year before. LL Cool J’s second stint at the Grammys split opinion, with his tendency to lick his lips alittle more than usual quickly becoming a point of interest for Twitter trolls. Last night’s Oscars job by Seth Macfarlane was similarly divisive, although our analysis would indicate that the Family Guy creator came off better on Twitter than critics have suggested as he still pulled in more positive than negative mentions overall. As we saw in last week’s Tweet analysis, the Brits were up nearly half a million viewers from last year. Media coverage widely critiqued the ceremony as bland, with a poll by Music Week stating that 85% of pollers didn’t find the event as exciting as previous years. Laura Whitmore may have called Corden the “Host with the Most”, but he failed to impress online as less than a third of the comedian’s overall mentions were positive; in fact, Corden was the only host to take a negative index. Perhaps he was playing it safe after last year's scandal (although he did manage to get away with calling Simon Cowell a “beautiful bastard” before watershed without too much attention). It makes sense that audiences prefer hosts with experience of live comedy (Fey, Poehler and Fry). Corden and MacFarlane are both undeniably funny guys, but as writers and actors they're not as used to live action. LL Cool J similarly carries the show from A to B instead of making it his own. The level of insight that Twitter can offer into an event is impressive, and it's interesting to see how this can depart from what we see in traditional media. Seth MacFarlane's performance was panned in the morning press, but in reality his reception was more like 50:50. It was speculated the choice to use MacFarlane was to draw in younger audiences to the show, with the average age of viewers rising from 39 in 1993 to 59 last year. Whether he's achieved this we can't say for sure at this point, but the split would suggest not, as even tweets from those that understand Macfarlane's humor panned his set being too close to an episode of Family Guy.

Are the writers on strike or did Seth McFarlane bring in his team from Family Guy? #Oscars

—Hrag (@hragv) February 25, 2013

Advertisers and content producers alike should be leveraging the powerhouse of public opinion that is Twitter to help guide their choices when planning for 2013, paying special attention to the personalities that can guarantee Twitter engagement. And although sentiment analysis can be time consuming, it's worth scraping the surface to see what stories Twitter can tell besides just volume of tweets.

On Wednesday night an immense 6.3 million of us tuned in to ITV for a star-studded evening of music and entertainment at the Brits. Broadcast from the O2 and hosted by James Corden, the show saw an increase of nearly 400,000 viewers from last year. This leap in viewers was also reflected on Twitter, who reported this year’s Brits as "more talked about than ever before". Using our social listening platform EchoScreen, we took a look at how the event played out on the Twitter feed - see the end of post with full infographic highlighting performances, awards and band reviews.

Engagement Drivers

A total of 1.26 million tweets were counted throughout the broadcast (with teen faves One Direction accruing more than their fair share of mentions), but by and large it was the awards themselves that drove the most engagement. The tweet peak came early on when bookie favourites Mumford and Sons took Best British Band, hitting a whopping 14882 tweets a minute, while Emeli Sande's scoop of Best Female Solo Artist was just a fraction off that total with 14782. In fact the top five peaks were all award-driven with the exception of Justin Timberlake’s performance of new song, “Mirrors”. Additionally, all five peaks appeared in the first hour of the show.

Perhaps another surprise was the low volume of tweets around Adele's Best Single award. The songstress is usually a hit on Twitter, so perhaps the lower count can be attributed to her absence from the ceremony, suggesting on-screen action could be a driving factor in artist support. We saw similar behavior last summer during the Sports Personality of the Year award and tweets around Andy Murray; although proving the most mentioned name on the run-up, tweet volume dropped during the ceremony when the tennis star couldn't attend.

Tweeters begin to lose interest after the half-way point as we see volumes tail off - perhaps placing sure draw One Direction (who were the TV peak at 7.2 million) in centre of the show was a bad move from ITV. That said, Mumford and Sons drew nearly as many tweets from their album’s review as their win of Best British Band, but the high volume of tweets didn’t correlate to overall mentions of the band, suggesting that the sentiment on Twitter may have been in contention with the judges’ decision.

Which hashtag?

The Brits was also an interesting case study in hashtag adoption. Before the broadcast began tweets centered around the obvious choice, "Brits", but viewers were happy to follow on-screen prompts and switch to the Brits' own "Brits2013" when introduced. This led not to a regular feed of user-generated content, but to an “Event Page”, a specially curated list of accounts with relevant content around the Brits. Twitter feeds from magazines and music industry faves would appear first, but users could still view the general stream by clicking "all". The continued usage of Brits2013 implies that users were happy to access this list before “regular” conversation, although the fragmentation of hashtags used indicates that some might have found the event page confusing. A third contender, Britawards2013 starts slow but peaks mid-show and even overtakes the Brits2013 hashtag at 9:04, potentially due to minimal drive from the host (especially by ITV standards). Advertisers planning on running hashtag activity should ensure the hashtag of choice is communicated to new joiners, especially when introducing a new element of Twitter interaction like the event page. The event page will be an interesting one to watch - if it catches on there could be some brilliant opportunities for display, with page takeovers and sponsorships reaching an engaged audience during a relevant broadcast.

Leveraging your Klout

It’s no surprise that One Direction were the most mentioned band overall. However, taking a closer look into when these peaks occurred reveals surprises; their mentions are more consistent than any other artists’, but it wasn’t their performance or award acceptance that drove the tweets. Their performance was dwarfed by veterans Justin Timberlake and Robbie Williams - even newbie Ben Howard accrued more tweets. So what drove the extra volume? Looking back earlier the day we see that members riled up fans for the show between 16:45 and 17.45, which may explain their high engagement throughout the show.

The strong reactions around awards as opposed to performances (plus support for regular tweeters), suggest what drove audience reaction here was in a way quite a sweet sentiment; wanting to support and connect with their favorite stars as people. Harry Styles and Adele both command over 11 milllion followers, but the Brits shows that high a high follower count won't necessarily equal high a high volume of tweets without encouragement from the artist. And it's these volumes which are increasingly becoming more important to the media industry, especially so since Kantar announced the integration of social metrics with BARB data to realign TV viewing figures. As such, social TV really will be one to watch this year. Along with developments like event pages, this integration positions Twitter as a valuable aid in understanding not just what engages audiences, but also how we can connect with them.

Event infographic below.