Guardian wins newspaper URL tweet war 4
Other people have tweeted (or retweeted) the Guardian's URLs 328,288 times over the last 4 months - way more than any other UK newspaper.
The FT and Times have more followers on Twitter than the Telegraph and Mail - but they're not tweeted about as often. The Telegraph is in second place: 120,731 tweets by other people have included a link to one if its URLs. The Daily Mail is 3rd with 95,851.
How many times each newspaper has had a URL tweeted
| Newspaper site | Times their URLs have been tweeted | Their own tweets about their URLs | Other people's tweets about their URLs |
| Guardian | 373,188 | 44,900 | 328,288 |
| Telegraph | 234,831 | 114,100 | 120,731 |
| Daily Mail | 101,751 | 5,900 | 95,851 |
| The Sun | 39,280 | 5,700 | 33,580 |
| Independent | 41,223 | 16,800 | 24,423 |
| Times Online | 71,459 | 48,130 | 23,329 |
| Mirror | 1,7381 | 3,500 | 13,881 |
| Express | 2,818 | 0 | 2,818 |
| FT.com | 39,491 | 38,800 | 691 |
| TOTAL | 921,422 | 277,830 | 643,592 |
About the data
The figures show that the Guardian has successfully translated its massive follower advantage into other people tweeting about its URLs. There are some caveats about the data.
Number of times they have had a URL tweeted
The source for this data is the excellent BackTweets, which lets you check how often a domain or URL is tweeted. You can check how much tweeting goes on about this site, for instance.
BackTweets searches links for (a bit more than) the last 4 months. And it indexes all links on twitter, regardless of the user. I collected this data at 8pm on Thursday 16 July. You can see the current figure by clicking the link in the table.
Eliminating their own tweets
The key to making sense of this is to remove the tweets from newspaper's own Twitter accounts about their own URLs (the Telegraph has one account with 70,000 tweets to its own URLs). What's of interest is how often other people tweet their URLs - not how often they do it themselves. This was a bit trickier.
I added up all the tweets from each newspaper's many accounts (and rounded the figure) to get the totals above. This isn't a wholly accurate comparison however (but it's the best I could do) as:
- This data is for ever - not over the same 4-month period as the first set.
- Different Twitter accounts will have been created at different times - some may have operated for ages, some for just a few weeks. I have no easy way to tell this.
- Most newspaper Twitter accounts just tweet links to the paper's stories. A few engage with users, tweet other links etc (so the total tweets for these accounts will include tweets that didn't include a URL to their paper). However, I didn't try to account for this except for @TimesFashion - I took an arbitrary 30,000 off its self tweet total (because otherwise the Times figure came out negative).
I suspect it's this combination of things that make the FT figure look a bit odd. I've got more data on Twitter, Twitter statistics and newspapers if you're interested. Let me know what you think.
This is the personal blog of Malcolm Coles.
I imagine this likely has a lot to do with their topic of information also - the paper that generally tweets more about IT & Tech news will probably end up get retweeted more - especially if it's to do with Twitter news and developments in Social Media.
I've seen that usually these tech and Twitter related stories can end up getting RT over and over - even if they are not major news to all but quite important to the Twitterati.
Next you'll be suggesting *I* blog about Twitter a lot more since I joined it ...!
Malcolm,
Thanks for this excellent post and I agree with Adam about the factors which are likely at work.
I would be interested to see how these tweets and retweets actually convert into clicks, and ultimately, page views.
Advertisers will increasingly demand this level of data from media websites.
Richard
Now, if only I could get the papers to simultaneously leak me their analytics data ...