If this year’s Super Bowl and Academy Awards ceremony have shown us anything, it is that people talk about television on social media…a lot. The Super Bowl alone had tens of millions of people talking about every moment of the game, but the so-called “second screen” TV experience extends beyond tweeting about game scores or sharing your love for your favorite show.

According to a study by The Nielsen Company, social media chatter exposes people to more shows, makes them more engaged in the shows they already watch, and makes them more likely to watch TV live. Nielsen also recently showed that social media chatter volume is an excellent barometer of the popularity of a show  (duh?), so the more people using tools like Twitter or Facebook to talk about TV, the better idea studios will have of which shows are doing well.

Twitter Inc has been in tough competition with Facebook Inc over which service will be the dominant second screen tool, and they faced a fierce battle over the Super Bowl, with Facebook coming out on top with 65 million users participating. Now, Twitter is experimenting with a new “TV Timelines” feature in an attempt to make it easier for viewers to follow the shows they like, while also becoming their go-to app when talking about TV shows.

TV Timelines are supposed to streamline and unify the second screen experience on Twitter by combining conversations about shows into an easy to follow format. Right now the feature is being tested with a handful of popular shows, including @Midnight, American Idol, The Big Bang Theory, and The Blacklist.

The feature works similarly to dashboard tools like TweetDeck, but it solely focuses on individual TV series. Users can choose between different tabs for highlighted tweets or media, and the show page will include related content like pictures, video, and Vines.

Twitter’s new TV Timelines feature is still in early testing and is currently available to a handful of iPhone users, but with Twitter’s recent push for more features and better usability, it could make its way out to more users in the next few months.

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