malcolm coles

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.

Dear the Express. Please look at the right twitter a/cs when discussing the BBC’s followers. That is all.

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

Short and to the point. But @guardiantech reached 1 million followers early this morning.
It benefits massively from being on Twitter’s suggested users list. But impressive nonetheless. You can see more UK newspaper twitter numbers here.

With 981,359 followers, @Guardiantech is closing in on a million, as I reveal the latest figures for UK newspaper Twitter accounts. @GuardianTech has jumped 150,000 followers in a month. @TimesFashion (29,190 followers) has moved up one place to 2nd, overtaking @GuardianNews (27,802) which is now 3rd.

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 have included a link to one if its URLs. The Daily Mail is 3rd with 95,851.

I recently counted all the official national newspaper twitter accounts. It took a long time. So I want the figures to update automatically. Here’s what I’ve done so far. Can you help me do it better?

National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across all their Twitter accounts – with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers in the top 10 newspaper accounts. The Guardian’s the clear Twitter winner, as it’s place on the Twitter Suggested User List means that its GuardianTech account has 831,935 followers – 78% of the total …

There are twice as many tweets about men (ie including the word ‘he’) as there are about women (ie including the word ’she’).

Tweeting about beer and wine peaks at 2am saturday and then again at midnight saturday. Tweets about being drunk peak at 8am on saturday and sunday. Although they can’t have been that drunk, or they wouldn’t be up at that time tweeting.

There are twice as many men tweeting as women. Or men are twice as likely to tweet about their wives as vice versa?.

The percentage of tweets containing ‘I’ follows a similar pattern each day – peeking at 6am, and falling to a daily low at 12am.

One in 5 tweets contain a URL. Tweets are more likely to contain links on weekdays than weekends. And tweets at 10am are more likely to contain links that at other times.

The best time to tweet if you want people to notice is … 4.01pm, according to my survey of nearly 120 Twitter users. 11am-12pm is another good time – but you’ve got more chance of being retweeted at 4.01pm.