UK Newspapers in Social Media: winners and losers

December 19, 2012

As yesterday’s blog post shows, social media continues to radically transform the ways traditional journalism operates across the world. We learnt that some of year’s biggest stories broke via Twitter, not printed press. And traditional journalism will either transform, or die.

An unanswered question remains though – how are UK’s newspapers navigating the uncharted territory of social media? Here’s a quick glance at the performance of six popular newspapers on Twitter – the hub of world’s instantaneous conversation.

The total number of followers and tweets is a good indicator of the user’s aggregate activity. Financial Times and the Telegraph are clear leaders in this category.

Number of Followers

@FinancialTimes	1017671
@Guardian	720,638
@TheSunNewspaper	205968
@Telegraph	158859
@Independent	146256
@TheTimes	52111

Total number of Tweets

@Telegraph	155510
@TheTimes	66905
@Independent	43619
@FinancialTimes	30253
@Guardian	23029
@TheSunNewspaper	15078

Seeing who joined Twitter first is another way to measure adaptability. Interestingly, Financial Times was the quickest to join the Twitterverse back in 2007.

Who joined first?

@FinancialTimes	16-Apr-07
@TheTimes	17-May-07
@Telegraph	18-Sep-08
@Independent	26-Oct-08
@TheSunNewspaper	23-Apr-09
@Guardian	05-Nov-09

Nevertheless, the quality of content is more important than quantity. Engagement rate can be measured by the relative number of retweets or replies. In these categories The Sun and the Guardian are clear leaders.

Number of Retweets per 100 tweets

@TheSunNewspaper	3083
@Guardian	1656
@Independent	1402
@FinancialTimes	394
@Telegraph	314
@TheTimes	137

Number of Replies per 100 tweets

@Guardian	196
@TheSunNewspaper	123
@FinancialTimes	41
@Independent	29
@Telegraph	14
@TheTimes	8

And what kind of content do these newspapers post? Here are the most retweeted posts for each newspaper:

Data sources:
twitter.com
mytoptweet.com
whendidyoujointwitter.com
twtrland.com

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