140Char

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?

• The Telegraph: 5180 results.
• The Guardian: 3779 results.
• The Financial Times: 1887 results.
• The Times: 1033 results.
• The Daily Mail: 825 results.
• The Sun: 579 results (inc: The Scottish Sun)
• The Mirror: 100 results (Search total limited – site:themirror.co.uk twitter = 82,000 results)
• The Daily Star: 87 results.
• The Daily Express: 78 results.
• The Independent: 56 results (Note – their Google-powered site search is limited in some way! A general google ‘site:theindependent.com twitter‘ reveals 1400 results)

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.