Social media platforms, such as Twitter, are changing the way people consume broadcast television media. For producers, social media metrics provide new insights and challenge incumbent measuring instruments, such as viewing rates. Within academia, Twitter’s relevance for audience research has developed only recently, whereby both opportunities and pitfalls are defined. In this paper, we depart from the idea that viewing rates and Twitter data enrich one another. We provide a conceptual and empirical comparison between both measures. Twitter data deepens our understanding of the viewing audience and viewing rates concurrently allow us to account for the relative importance of the tweeting audience. The data shows interesting inverse relations between ratings and Twitter traction for particular television programs, revealing low ratings in conjunction with high traction on Twitter and vice versa. Future endeavors for audience research and the role of social media data in social sciences are discussed.