Which newspaper mentions Twitter the most? (UK)

Dan Thornton | October 23, 2009

Although 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 Guardian and The Daily Mail all attracting over 30 million unique users in September 2009.

So I thought it would be interesting to see exactly which ones were mentioning Twitter the most – and to keep it simple and relevant for everyone, I decided to only use their search functionality to work it out:

So which newspapers have mentioned Twitter the most?

Key thoughts from this simple experiment:

  • Most people would probably have put The Guardian top if asked.
  • The fact Twitter search returns and ABCe results are closely linked suggests the effectiveness of site structure and search functionality, rather than Twitter mentions being integral to driving readers! (I’m sure Martin has much more in-depth information on this as part of the team at The Guardian).
  • At least a couple of sites have seriously wonky search functionality, despite being two of many with search powered or ‘enhanced by’ Google.
  • It’s definitely skewed towards the ‘middle-class’ broadsheets regardless of political leaning, which is what most people would expect.
  • There’s a power law in full effect, with two/three sites providing most of the coverage.
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  • Nice idea, although some of the site searches probably don't give the full picture (as you suggest with the Independent and Mirror). Might be interesting to compare with results using Nexis, for example.
  • Hmm, I think you'll find there is a big difference between authored articles that mention Twitter, and HTML pages that have been indexed by a search engine that mention Twitter - for example in the first page of Telegraph results this page is listed - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/promotions/6415819/F... - and the only mention of Twitter is a 'Sign up to our TelegraphTowers feed' at the bottom. Likewise this Guardian URL is listed in our site search - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/2009/s... - but the only mention is in the generic "• Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter" in the foot of the article. You might get a better idea of frequency by comparing the rate at which stories are appearing on these two keyword / topic pages http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/twitter and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/
  • See, I knew you'd start applying more rigourous logic to the tracking! I'll definitely start looking at those pages, but the flaw will be if Twitter is mentioned in contexts other than technology - such as celebrity, or general news. Plus there's no handy number for a total of articles on those topic pages!

    But there's definitely a lot of scope for improvement, as Jonathan and yourself have said - I'll be investigating better ways shortly as there seems to be some interest in the findings!
  • It has been rightly pointed out to me that TelegraphTowers should be @telegraphoffers
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