National UK newspapers had 1,665,202 followers of their Twitter accounts at the start of October – an increase of 193,266 on September 1st (when they had 1,471,936).
The rate of growth has slowed, however. This is a monthly increase of 13.1%, compared with 17% from August 1 to September 1, and also from July 1 to August 1.
What’s more, 151,555 of the increase (or 78% of the total) is down to just one account – that of @guardiantech (which owes its popularity to its place on the Twitter Suggested User List). Indeed, of the 131 accounts I’m tracking, 51 have fewer followers than me (@malcolmcoles)!
You can see the full table here, or below (although the iframe isn’t behaving properly, so you’re better off clicking here).
More telling/useful might be an analysis of Twitter followers of journalists at those papers..
Charles: such a thing used to exist. There was a site somewhere that had a list of UK journalists and used to update the number of followers automatically every day. I can’t find it any more – I guess it must have stopped.
I tried to do a similar daily automatic update with this data but was defeated by the update limits on google sreadsheets and the like.
Anyway, the reason I use official accounts was because the journalist data already existed. As it no longer does, maybe when I get the time, I’ll do a list of journalists to sit alongside this list.
And having spent 10 minutes trying to track it down, I then remembered where it was: http://www.mediauk.com/newspapers/people/twitter/
[...] Twitter followers for UK national newspapers have been tracked for a while now by Malcolm Coles over at the Online Journalism Blog. [...]