At The Practice, we’re big fans of reality music shows like The X Factor and The Voice. Aside from the obvious entertainment value, we also love to vote, follow, interact, and join the conversation in real time. Who doesn’t love to share their opinions when these shows offer so much scope for gossip and debate?

According to recent statistics from Carat Media Agency, a staggering 60% of viewers watch TV and go online simultaneously, and 51% use Facebook whilst watching reality shows. Are we as a nation, guilty of Bumblebee eyes? At The Practice, we think so. Today, it’s all about the multiple interface and multiple screen experience.

Online participation is the main way in which these programmes maintain viewer interest through all visual mediums. We’ve seen the US edition of The Voice introduce voting via their Facebook app, complete with a sharing feature and timeline. As expected, The Voice UK and The X Factor both showed a live Twitter reel on screen and encouraged audience interaction via their own hash tags. Britain’s Got Talent, however, was even savvier with its own Twitter handle (@gottalent), and online VOD channel.

Similarly, MTV also demonstrated how the company used several social media outlets to drive audience participation. For the MTV Movie Awards held earlier this month, fans were able to vote using Twitter hash tags with examples including #votepotter, and #votekatniss. Another feature on display during the ceremony itself was the Twitter tracker. This was displayed digitally, showing the number of tweets per minute based on trending topics. The novel part of this was that viewers could see related clips and images from the show which linked to the featured topic. This year, their Facebook Tracker was also launched, showing a cumulative display of traffic and activity of Movie Awards moments. Fans were also given the ‘All Access Live’ experience, catered to phone, desktop and tablet interfaces alike. This provided six camera angles showing behind the scenes areas, a place for viewers to interact with one another, as well as celebrity GIFs.

So who else is jumping on the proverbial bandwagon? The BET (Black Entertainment Television) Awards are set to launch a mobile app later this month featuring a clickable timeline, artist profiles, tweets and videos. Users will be able to tweet, vote for nominees, and a unique ‘Tweetmap’ feature will let fans view each others’ tweeting locations. To increase popularity, engagement and provide incentive, prominent users will be rewarded with prizes.

What are the results of these endeavours? Last year’s MTV VMAs ratings proved that the more viewers interacted and engaged through social media, the more likely they were to tune in on TV. Clearly, the more social media outlets a company can utilise, the higher their ratings; with so many talent shows in direct competition for viewership, these have never been so important.

So it’s evident that voting and conversational social media streams are great in themselves for entertainment companies to meet the needs of their fans who crave involvement. Yet they’re of course an extremely clever and viable business tactic; the social media platform only really acts as a launch pad to generate further revenue.  Potential generation from these include greater traffic towards their respective sites, YouTube channels, and most profitably, increased sales of music and music videos. Their popularity also means that emerging talent and sponsoring brands would bode extremely well from getting on board.

What do you think is the next step in how we, as viewers, engage with the shows we love? Do you like to get involved? As ever, we’d love to hear your opinions, so please tweet to us via @PracticeDigital and have your say on Facebook.