5 Social TV Best Practices for Single Screen iTV Apps

Social and the Single Screen

Your interactive television marketing strategy must leverage the strength of existing social media platforms (see Building a Business Case for Social Strategies) because your viewers are already interacting with social platforms while they are watching your programming. Get them interacting with you!

5 Social TV Best Practices

Keep these 5 Social TV Best Practices for single screen apps in mind as you design your app:

1. Use configurable calls-to-action to get social media devotees engaged with your app.
2. Tap into social dialogues that are already occurring. Target shows with higher levels of Twitter followers (my preference given size cap) and Facebook friends.
3. Don't frustrate viewers by asking them to participate via the single screen. I can't think of a poorer user experience than using my remote to tweet via a virtual keyboard.
4. Invite viewers to join on another screen if they want to.
5. Give viewers the ability to scroll through and refresh the social feed so even if they don't join the conversation, they have a way to engage.

Leveraging Twitter: A Case Study

With these in mind, take a closer look at the above demo that takes these best practices to heart. For this single screen app, we partnered with Ensequence, WE tv, and MSG/Fuse to design an app that invites viewers to follow Twitter feeds and engage with both programming and fellow viewers. But we also encourage viewers to engage on a second device if they choose to. (For more of our interactive work with WE tv see Bridezillas Engages Interactive TV.)

Congrats to WE tv, MSG and Ensequence who won an award for this app at CTAM's iTV Idol competition last month. What's been your experience with social media and single screen apps?

Will Keller is the founder and president of WE Keller Group and specializes in interactive television marketing, especially in the programming, retail and airline sectors. You can learn more about his business here.