By Edward Gindi
After the popular show Breaking Bad finally was over, Twitter and Facebook raced to tell the news media about the people who reacted to the show on their respective social media sites. Twitter and Facebook are in a battle to gain more market share of the advertising spending which is estimated at 171 billion according to eMarketer. Sorting out which company deserves the title as leader of the industry is hard to tell. Each company uses its own standard of calculation. According to Nielsen, Twitter had 600,000 people posting 1.2 million posts about the ending of Breaking Bad, a 10 hour period. Those numbers are skewed because the statistic included retweets that pass along what others wrote. Facebook says that 3 million people have posted on its service referring to the show. These numbers are misleading because these figures include those who comments on a post and likes. Facebook took these figures in a 24 hour time span. This public relations blitz show how important old school television is still relevant among the new age of age of social media users. Twitter has made this a focus of there’s and has signed a number of TV related advertising deals over the last year which include Verizon and ESPN to increase there hype as it prepares to sell its stock for the 1st time next month. Industry experts, however, doubt that Facebook or twitter are making much revenue from TV related advertising. Though, something that is exciting to network and advertisers is that Twitter has 2,000 people posting messages per show an average of 100,000 people are seeing those messages. For viewers, the lines between what they see on TV and there smart phones are quickly blurring. For example, during this years U.S open Heineken who sponsored the event posted the video highlights of the memorable events of the U.S open. “We were trying to bring people who weren’t there all of us realize how powerful twitter can be in getting the conversation going” said Ron Amram senior media director at Heineken.Facebook, whose social platform is built more around each individual’s web of relationships than rapid-fire conversation, has a more complicated relationship with TV.