This past week, Nielsen announced the acquisition of SocialGuide, a company that measures the social media engagement of television shows.  According to Forbes, there’s heightened interest to see where this acquisition will take the future of television.

For those who were paying attention to major networks during the Olympics and the presidential election, Twitter’s impact on television is no surprise.  Most major TV networks keyed into the relationship between TV watchers and tweeters, and these two events saw real-time tweet counters sharing the social media buzz with viewers.

The real mystery is, what will social media monitoring do for television programming?  There are already tons of complaints about the Nielsen rating system. Fans of canceled TV shows, such as Firefly, have long held the conspiracy theory that television rating systems are flawed, and that those flaws are responsible for the demise of shows which seem to have large followings but bad ratings.

Could social media monitoring be the missing piece of the puzzle to more accurate TV ratings?  Other companies who monitor the social media buzz around television believe so, and are excited about the acquisition.  Trendrr spokesperson Jason Damata sums it up well: “…Nielsen’s acquisition of Social Guide is a net positive for the entire industry and helps to further validate the importance of social TV analytics.”