Your Facebook posts will soon help determine TV ratings

If you've been ranting about TV shows on Facebook, it will soon help determine Nielsen's TV ratings data.

Facebook is set to begin sharing your posts and conversations about TV shows on the social media platform, whether public or private, with Nielsen.

If you're worried about your privacy, though, Nielsen is assuring users that the information Facebook hands over will be completely anonymous.

"Facebook will deliver directly to Nielsen the aggregated and anonymous program-related conversation on Facebook, including posts shared with friends, family and publicly, while respecting and in full compliance with consumer privacy," Nielsen said in its announcement.

It isn't exactly clear if this will include private conversations through Facebook Messenger, though it seems like it will only include Facebook posts. Regardless, we're getting in touch with Facebook and Nielsen to clarify.

Social ratings

Nielsen has already tracked Twitter for more than two years, taking into account mentions of shows and how many Twitter users view tweets with the mentions.

With the inclusion of Facebook, Instagram is next in line to be integrated, though it will be interesting to see how Instagram posts will be measured.

Nielsen says its current Social Content Ratings program measures "program-related conversation for each social networking service tracked and gross totals across social networks."

This includes "social media authorship (eg, posts, wweets), engagement (eg, comments, likes, replies, Retweets, shares), reach (audience and impressions) and demographics (age and gender) as available."

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