Weather Channel Forecasts Now Include Tweets

**Waqas** · August 11, 2011

The Weather Channel, in partnership with Twitter, is launching The Weather Channel Social, a new web, mobile and on-air initiative that will pair weather-related tweets with city forecasts.

On the web, The Weather Channel Social application is shown on local forecast pages and will showcase tweets — matched for relevance — with information on nearby weather conditions.

Tweets will appear on every local forecast page, in real time, in the company’s iPhone application. Tweets will also be featured during The Weather Channel’s live television broadcasts. The network plans to show tweets before, during and after weather events, and will use live programming to discuss and report on weather trends bubbling up on Twitter.

In addition, The Weather Channel has created 220 local Twitter feeds for cities with populations of more than 100,000.

“Adding Social to all of our platforms makes our storytelling more complete,” says Cameron Clayton, executive vice president of digital products of The Weather Channel, “enabling us to partner our expertise and forecasting with real-time local input about the weather from our consumers in a way that is relevant and personal.”

The network points to a number of statistics to make its case. On average, U.S. Twitter users send 200 weather-related tweets per minute. The figure jumps to 300 to 500 tweets per minute on an active weather day. And when there’s a significant weather event, Twitter users have been known to post more than 2 million related tweets in a day.

To further promote its social endeavor, The Weather Channel has taken to the influence network Klout to offer users with high scores a perk in the form of a free Weather Channel umbrella.

The Weather Channel Social was developed by Razorfish and is sponsored by Citi. Twitter and The Weather Channel will share in revenue from the sponsored initiative, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, PashaIgnatov

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