These are all my posts about Twitter, such as how to do things, interesting findings and various looks at twitter statistics. You’ll also find my posts about newspapers on twitter, tracking the rise of growth in their follower numbers. And, of course, the great story where the Express confused follower and following numbers.
There was a curious end to yesterday’s Dragon’s Den when Evan Davis turned to the camera and said: “Why not tell us what you think of today’s programme by joining the conversation on Twitter.”
But then, although someone is clearly running the account, they haven’t actually replied to anyone’s tweets. Odd.
Twitter has – finally – improved the email it sends to people to explain that someone is now following you. The old email told you how many followers they had, how many they followed and how many tweets they’d sent.
The new one, designed like the hovercard that appears on when you’re logged in on twitter.com and hover over someone’s name, also gives you their location and bio.
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Adam Sherk recently pointed out that Twitter drives less than 1% of traffic to US newspaper and magazine sites (but noted that this still makes it “a top 25 referrer for all the [10 sites he asked] and top 10 referrers for most”).
Trying my luck somewhat, I asked people from the three largest UK newspaper sites (the Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Guardian) what their figures were.
* For the Mail, under 0.5% of their referrer traffic is from Twitter.
* For the Telegraph, 0.5% of global traffic and 0.25% of uk traffic currently comes from twitter.
* For the Guardian, 0.4% of their page impressions in February came from Twitter.
You’d have thought people would realise the folly of unmoderated hashtag-based twitter streams by now (see Skittles etc). But not the Conservatives. Their new Cash Gordon site displays the latest tweets using the #cashgordon tag – with no filtering or moderation, as these screenshots show.
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I might be going bonkers. But I have a Firefox stylesheet that reveals which links are nofollow. And ‘m fairly sure that, last time I looked, @ mentions of people’s names weren’t nofollowed – but now are, as this screenshot demonstrates.
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Twitter seems to be adding an explanation to some trends, sourced from whatthetrend.com. Here’s an example for a search on John Terry today.
Seems a good innovation to me. Should help with some of the more mysterious trends that only carry on as people ask why is X trending.
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John Terry’s been “nobbing” Wayne Bridge’s girlfriend as one of the edits on Wikipedia puts it. Terry got a superinjunction forbidding publication of this story – and of the fact that there was an injunction. This all fell apart on Friday. The case raises some interesting issues:
Despite the superinjunction, you could find out about the [...]
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I pointed out this morning that the Express was talking utter rubbish claiming that the BBC was keeping up twitter accounts with 0 or 2 followers. The real numbers were in the 000s.
It appears the Express has confused following and follower numbers. Ha ha ha ha ha.
Read the full post ...Dear the Express. Please look at the right twitter a/cs when discussing the BBC’s followers. That is all.
Read the full post ...UK national newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow – but the rate is getting slower and slower, according to the latest figures for the 129 accounts I’m tracking. November to December growth was just 6.6%, down from 17% earlier in the year.
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I’ve really begun to loathe Twitter’s new retweet function. Here’s why:
Pictures of people I don’t follow, unclear menu options and not being able to see who is retweeting stuff.
On top of the new Twitter retweet feature, I also seem to have got the new web-based method for alerts about new new tweets from people you follow. These changes are all bringing the functionality of the web interface for Twitter closer to the various desktop clients.
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Despite having to wait ages for lists and Google wave, I seem to have Twitter RTs early. I haven’t actually seen a live one yet … And I don’t really like the sound of them as I like to comment on RTs. But maybe that’s just me.
Read the full post ...Newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow – but at an ever slower rate, according to the latest figures for the 130 accounts I’m tracking. October to November growth was just 8.3%.
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Want to get your Twitter page doing better in Google for a search on your name? Here’s a way to get a link off the BBC to your Twitter URL.
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It was oneletteroffmovies day on Twitter on Saturday – turning Top Gun into Top Gum, and Pirates of the Caribbean into Pilates of the Caribbean etc. My contribution was “BT – one alien’s struggle to get broadband so he can email home”. And then BT started to tweet me …
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Is Google using signals from Twitteras part of its ranking decisions. You could see why it want to – seeing which pages people are passing around on Twitter would help it work out which pages are relevant for ‘newsy’ search terms (those where there is a big surge in searches for particular keywords).
The evidence
Testing such a thing would be a nightmare – how could you set up 2 different, but similar, pages and get loads of people to tweet one and not the other? I managed to set up this test by accident – here are the results.
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Update According to Google, at 2.45pm, Jan Moir is the 42nd most popular search in the last hour. The Mail must be loving the traffic they are getting. So, why don’t you try contacting the advertisers on that page to let them know what you think of their brand sitting alongside the story? Try retweeting [...]
Read the full post ...National UK newspapers had 1,665,202 followers of their Twitter accounts at the start of October – an increase of 193,266 on September 1st (when they had 1,471,936).
The rate of growth has slowed, however. This is a monthly increase of 13.1%, compared with 17% from August 1 to September 1, and also from July 1 to August 1.
Read the full post ...National UK newspaper accounts had 1,471,936 followers at the start of September, an increase of 213,892 or 17% on August 1 (when they had 1,258,044 followers).
You can see the September figures in the table.
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