National UK newspapers had 1,471,936 Twitter followers at the start of September – up 213,892 or 17% on August 1 (when they had 1,258,044 followers).
You can see the September figures (orignally posted here) below or here.
I have more Twitter statistics here.
14 Comments
Can we infer something about the relative values of general UK internet users and Twitter users by the fact that the Daily Mail is still the most visited newspaper site in the UK, but is way behind the Guardian, Times and FT on Twitter?
GuardianTech takes up 160,000 of those new followers, and that’s largely because it’s on Twitter’s suggested users page.
Interesting post. The numbers are still relatively low in the context of newspaper consumption, however it does demonstrate a growing trend of people expecting news to find them rather than going to find the news
@conrad You’re right. I discussed guardiantech as the gorilla in the room when I started this series, but I got bored of making the same point each month!
In fact, apart from @timesfashion leapfrogging into 2nd place last month, there’s not been that many changes over the last couple of months – especially down the bottom of the table where the mirror is just going through the motions …. (Click through to the full table to see this – for some reason the right hand scroll bar isn’t showing for me).
Depends on your definition of ‘national’ of course, but The Scotsman’s main Twitter channel (@scotsmandotcom) has around 1,300 followers.
Our combined follower count, taking in 11 different Twitter channels, is somewhere around the 4,000 mark.
Can I point to @scotsmandotcom – 1,302 followers as I write this and handled via Tweetdeck for maximum interaction. Full disclosure: owned by the outfit that pays by wages.
Ah, beaten to the punch. And that’s ‘my wages’, of course, not ‘by wages’.
Nick: I’ve discussed the issue around Scottish papers in the comments here before. I may be calling them the wrong thing (but can’t think of a better name – the UK thing is more to stop Americans thinking the Times is the NY Times which has happened before!). The Scottish ones don’t take part in the ABCes so I tend to exclude them from my newspaper comparisons. Still, I should probably exclude the FT on that basis some months.
The national UK newspapers in Twitter are mostly the Guardian presence, because the others are practically nonexistent in this social channel.
Malcolm: Most Scottish papers don’t submit to ABCe but Scotsman.com does: http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=44210&c=1
Am I right in assuming that these are mainly newsfeeds?
I find the figures surprisingly low – is that because newspapers online have minimal direct person-to-person contact. Compare with media with more intimate contact e.g., radio.
It is worth noting that individual journalist with their “personal work related” feeds would be very high on that list.
e.g., Jemima Kiss on 13k, Jack Schofield 7k, Charles Arthur 9k (all Guardian again).
Also the prof. feed of Journalism.co.uk would be 5 on this list.
Matt: yes, mostly newsfeeds. When I started counting in July, I pointed out that:
Out of 131 accounts, just 24 do something other than running as a glorified RSS feed. The other 107 do no retweeting, no replying to other tweets etc.
@timesfashion is one of the 24 – it’s very engaged with its readers. No surprise, maybe, that it’s risen to number 2? (Of course, you could argue that the number of followers is a pointless metric, especially with accounts that have a following/follower ratio of close to 1 …).
>(Of course, you could argue that the number of followers is a pointless metric, especially with accounts that have a following/follower ratio of close to 1 …).
I couldn’t possibly comment that (cough). But I think that there are also factors such as whether someone has an existing platform or profile, which makes quite a bit of difference.
Instant updates like twitter have forced reporters to work a lot harder. They have to constantly be keeping up on news. Not like every hour constantly for the website, but every few minutes, or whenever something new happens. If they aren’t, somebody else probably is.
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