Twitter and GfK have announced a partnership to "introduce GfK Twitter TV Ratings in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. The new service will provide insights into the frequency and reach of messages from Twitter users associated with television programs and campaigns."

Those watching the "social TV" industry will recall the deal Nielsen announced with Twitter at the end of 2012 (I wrote about the deal and implications of this kind of measurement for my work website at the time.)

And those wondering why the UK wasn't included in the deal may want to cast their mind back to last August, when a similar partnership between Twitter and Kantar (with SecondSync providing data) was announced.

The big question from my point of view is about how this "reach" measurement is being measured.

Will it be based on inflated counts that assume that every follower sees every tweet, and doesn't account for the fact that people might follow more than one person who tweets about a programme?

Or will it be based on actual data from Twitter, who presumably have the ability to know how many people actually see each tweet (given that they have to do the work of putting it in front of them.)

Sadly, I'm expecting the former…