Twitter is making its TV rating service available in Australia

Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings are to be made available to Australian partners in a move designed to further blur the overlap between TV viewing and social media. The industry-standard TV-metric will provide broadcasters with a single common benchmark from which to gauge the success of their social engagement, complementing existing audience measurements.

Twitter is continuing to expand the reach of its TV rating service with Nielsen, after it announced plans to launch it in Australia during the second half of the year. The service — which adds a range of Twitter metrics related to TV shows to Nielsen’s existing TV ratings data — first went live in the US in 2012 and is broadly targeted at the advertising and media industry. Twitter seems intent on growing it aggressively this year, and it has already revealed plans to expand into Japan and Europe. Twitter reportedly has 4 million registered users in Australia — that’s around one fifth of the country’s population.