Twitter chatter will soon be used to measure the popularity of Australian TV shows.
Nielsen announced on Monday a plan to launch its Twitter TV ratings service in Australia in the second half of 2014.
Australia will be the third country to have access to the service, after the US and Italy.
For each TV episode, Nielsen will tally the number of unique tweets, the number of unique tweeters and the number of eyeballs those tweets reach.
The firm will also measure the number of unique accounts with at least one impression of a tweet ascribed to a TV episode.
According to Nielsen research, 44 per cent of Australians online chat about TV shows on social media.
James Hier, the chief strategy officer at digital media agency MEC, said social media was transforming TV viewing from a passive to an active pastime.
Twitter provides insight not only into viewer numbers but also the way in which viewers engage with what they see, he said.
"What the industry has lacked is a recognised currency and tool to take advantage of this phenomenon at scale."
More than 90 US networks use Nielsen's Twitter TV ratings.
The latest figures, for the week ending on March 16, put the American ABC network's The Bachelor on top, with 742,000 tweets from 294,000 unique tweeters reaching 107 million Twitter users.
Nielsen says the Twitter ratings will supplement rather than replace the existing OzTAM and regional TAM ratings.
The announcement comes two days after Twitter pulled its music discovery app.
The service used hashtags such as #NowPlaying to aggregate songs and music suggestions from people users followed, but US reports said app downloads and engagement were abysmal.
