Other people have tweeted (or retweeted) the Guardian’s URLs 328,288 times over the last 4 months – way more than any other UK newspaper, according to my full analysis here.
The FT and Times have more followers on Twitter than the Telegraph and Mail – but they’re not tweeted about as often. The Telegraph is in second place: 120,731 tweets by other people (ie excluding the Telegraph’s own accounts) have included a link to one if its URLs. The Daily Mail is 3rd with 95,851.
How many times each newspaper has had a URL tweeted by someone else
- Guardian: 328,288
- Telegraph: 120,731
- Daily Mail: 95,851
- The Sun: 33,580
- Independent: 24,423
- Times Online: 23,329
- Mirror: 13,881
- Express: 2,818
- FT.com: 691
About the data
The figures show that the Guardian has successfully translated its massive follower advantage into other people tweeting about its URLs. There are some caveats about the data (especially about the Times and FT figures), which you can read on the original version of this post (there are some other Twitter statistics about newspapers etc on my blog too).
Online Journalism Blog 
I wonder what this translates into in terms of pageviews. That might actually be enough to show a rough ROI…
Doesn’t bit.ly let you see how many times a link is clicked even if you didn’t shorten it?
Maybe by combining that with some backtweet data we could estimate the average % clickthrough rate for a URL in a tweet. There’s still the problem of the paper’s own tweeting vs other people’s tweeting (which might have different CTRs).
Would be simpler if they all just leaked me their analytics data. Cough.
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I’m just happy to see journalists successfully embracing social media, regardless of the number of retweets.
@Ian – My guess is that this traffic probably performs pretty well since it’s “pre-qualified”. It’s difficult to get great ad revenue online (as compared to print), but it’s a start.
Isn’t it cool to see the UK’s oldest paper embracing social media! I love it. Go Guardian! I am a Guardian Twitter follower–love FT, Daily Mail and Times Online too, but gotta give the Guardian credit for effective Twitter use.