Striving to plant new seeds in the multiplatform media landscape, Nielsen today added one very well-liked partner to its social media metrics. With conversations now joining activity and ratings on broadcast and cable TV and the streaming services, Nielsen hopes to be able to more fully gauge the elusive correlation between social media chatter and actual viewership — and the company got some applause from one of the Big 4 in the process.

“We applaud Nielsen for working with the industry to bring together major social media players in order to provide comprehensive measurement,” said David Poltrack, CBS Corp.’s CRO and CBS Vision boss. “Nielsen’s measurement of multiple social networks, each of which consumers use in different and unique ways, will provide programmers with a more holistic view of the total social conversation and deeper insights.”

With the nearly 3-year-old Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings soon to become known as Nielsen’s Social Content Ratings, the expanded idea is to monitor and measure conversation on both the Mark Zuckerberg-run online networking and friends platform as well as Twitter for authorship, engagement, reach and demographics. As part of the deal with Facebook, the company will hand over to Nielsen anonymous conversation and shares from its network related to media material such as TV series and events such as the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards.

While more diagnostic than standardized in approach than, say, the daily ratings it puts out for a prior evening’s primetime, the often-criticized Nielsen is moving fast on the program. Aiming for a lot of likes and ad buyer useful info, they plan to make the soon-to-be Social Content Ratings available in the current Twitter TV Ratings markets of the U.S, Australia, Italy and Mexico by the middle of 2016.

“With more than 330 million people on Facebook globally during the peak hour each day, we’re excited that Nielsen’s Social Content Ratings will now reflect this collective conversation happening on Facebook.”said Nick Grudin, Director of Media Partnerships at Facebook. Added Sean Casey, President of Nielsen Social: “Nielsen Social measurement is evolving to provide a comprehensive, standardized picture of how consumers are responding to program content through social media, wherever and whenever.”