Track Twitter followers for UK newspapers
Dan Thornton | October 8, 2009Twitter followers for UK national newspapers have been tracked for a while now by Malcolm Coles over at the Online Journalism Blog.
And there are some really interesting insights emerging – besides the fact that at 1,665,202 followers in total, the entire UK news industry has serious competition from the likes of Ashton Kutcher (3,777,896 followers )and Stephen Fry (794,146 followers).
Take out the @guardiantech account, which contributes 1.2 million followers, and things really don’t look brilliant in terms of scale for most accounts – it might look better if you aggregated all Times accounts, for example, but you’d still be in the low tens of thousands, and you’d still be part of a 400,000 (approx) total.
And although there’s reasonable growth, it’s again all skewed towards the Guardian Tech account, which is benefitting heavily from being included in the Suggested User List for new users.
The question is why news sources – which are proving to be pretty popular judging by their homepage statistics – are so much less attractive on Twitter?
I don’t think it’s the wrong location for finding news and information – in fact the opposite is true.
I do think there are potentially two reasons:
1. Perhaps the strength of major media news sources – which has been written about by many people – is in aggregating and providing context and insight into what’s going on, rather than attempting to ‘beat the crowd’ to the first tweet?
But I suspect it’s more likely to be:
2. If you simply plug in an RSS feed and then bugger off, you’ll never get anywhere.
Yes, the 2nd most popular account, TimesFashion, is very engaged
malcolm coles | October 8, 2009Yes, the 2nd most popular account, TimesFashion, is very engaged with its followers – I think this is the right model, rather than glorified RSS feed, if you want a lot of followers …
Yes, the 2nd most popular account, TimesFashion, is very engaged
malcolm coles | October 8, 2009Yes, the 2nd most popular account, TimesFashion, is very engaged with its followers – I think this is the right model, rather than glorified RSS feed, if you want a lot of followers …
Hi, thanks for commeting, as I've been a keen follower
Dan Thornton | October 8, 2009Hi, thanks for commeting, as I've been a keen follower of your hard work in tracking it (And then just putting my guesses over the top!). It would be interesting to go through each of the accounts checking for engagement or not – certainly I'd put money on either engagement or individual celebrity being the key driver for followers…
Your wish is my command! The very first time I
malcolm coles | October 8, 2009Your wish is my command! The very first time I put the stats together I did a column saying whether they were a glorified RSS feed or not: http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/newspapers-o...
Scroll the iframe to the right to get it. The list from back then has been refined (and I've switched from twittercounter to real Twitter API) so stats aren't directly comparable. But whether they are engaging with followers or pumping out headlines is probably the same.
Interesting comparison with Kutcher / Fry – wish I'd thought of it!!! Cheers.
There are many twitter applications through which you can know
hiteshthakur034 | October 10, 2009There are many twitter applications through which you can know your position as twitter followers in number of tweets received.
[...] Ashton Kutcher has people following him on Twitter than
140Char » Which newspaper mentions Twitter the most? (UK) | October 23, 2009[...] Ashton Kutcher has people following him on Twitter than the entire UK news industry, in terms of online readership, the UK news industry has pretty good reach, with The Telegraph, The [...]