Adam Sherk found that Twitter drives less than 1% of traffic to the US newspaper and magazine sites he asked (but noted that this still makes it "a top 25 referrer for all the sites and top 10 referrers for most").

Twitter as a referrer

Figures for the UK

Trying my luck somewhat, I asked the three largest UK newspaper sites (Telegraph, Daily Mail and 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.

Interpreting these figures

These figures are slightly lower than in the US (but that is where Twitter began) but will have grown strongly over the last 12 months from data I've seen for another newspaper site. I'm sure, as with the US, this puts Twitter in or near the top 10 referrers.

How many people

To put these into perspective, these newspaper sites get around 2 million unique users a day, so 0.5% is 10,000 visitors a day. While not to be sneezed at, it shows that search, news aggregators and direct traffic (RSS/bookmarks) are still more important than Twitter (whatever those of us on Twitter might think).

Twitter.com vs Twitter clients

But please bear in mind that interpreting Twitter traffic is notoriously hard - you can measure traffic that comes from twitter.com (although not always if it's using a URL shortener that frames the target page). Measuring traffic from other desktop clients (tweetdeck etc) is much harder.

@dirktherabbit pointed out recently that less than 20% of people access Twitter through the web. Danny Sullivan had a good rant that addressed many of the problems with people who release Twitter statistics (with a shorter summary of that here).

Looking at the stats for my own blog (comparing direct traffic (which is how Google Analytics records Twitter client traffic) to twitter.com referrals on days when there is a spike in traffic due to some Twitter-driven lynch mob), between 2 and 4 times as much traffic comes from desktop clients as twitter.com.

Thank yous

Thanks to James Bromley, Julian Sambles and Martin Belam for taking the time and being willing to share this data. If you'd like to follow some of their papers' Twitter feeds, try these links:

• The Daily Mail has a main headline Twitter feed at @mailonline. The easiest way to find its other feeds currently is to see who @DMAILsports is following.
• The Telegraph has a list of all Telegraph Twitter feeds. There is also a Twitter list of all these accounts, plus one of all Telegraph journalists on Twitter.
• The Guardian also has a list of the official Guardian Twitter accounts.

Oh, and you could also check out my previous posts on newspapers on twitter.

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 tens of 000s.

Express thinks following means follower.

It appears the Express has confused following and follower numbers.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Here's what they said:

The BBC Radio 2 site, which gathers messages, or “tweets”, from presenters such as Chris Evans, Jonathan Ross and Alan Carr, has no followers.

The BBC Radio 5 Live site, run by presenter Victoria Derbyshire, has just two.

Did they mean these accounts:

• http://twitter.com/onradio2now: 536 followers, but following 1 person
• http://twitter.com/vicderbyshire (Victoria Derbyshire): 3,639 followers, following 2 people.

Yes, they surely did. I wrote this morning that:

it makes it look like you don't know what you're talking about.

The original story. Clowns.

And they certainly don't.

Update: They've confused follower and following numbers!

Original: Read this: http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/152233/Is-the-BBC-run-by-a-bunch-of-Twitters-

The BBC Radio 2 site, which gathers messages, or “tweets”, from presenters such as Chris Evans, Jonathan Ross and Alan Carr, has no followers.

The BBC Radio 5 Live site, run by presenter Victoria Derbyshire, has just two.

Then look at:

• http://twitter.com/BBC_Radio_2: 12,000+ followers
• http://twitter.com/BBC5LIVE: 14,000+ followers.

Looks like the Express looked at the wrong accounts. Also, please don't refer to Twitter accounts as sites, as it makes it look like you don't know what you're talking about.

Oh, right.

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:

• July to August growth: 17%
• August to September growth: 17%
• September to October growth: 13.1%.
• October to November growth: 8.3%
• November to December growth: 6.6%

The detail

These accounts had 1,801,044 followers on November 2nd (ignoring one FT account that has been shut). On December 2nd they had 1,919,770 followers in total.

Of the 118,726 increase, 76,812 or 65% was for the @guardiantech account (which benefits from being on Twitter's suggested user list).

As ever, the full spreadsheet is here or you can see the iframe below.

UK national 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:

• July to August growth: 17%
• August to September growth: 17%
• September to October growth: 13.1%.
• October to November growth: 8.3%

The detail

These 130 accounts had 1,801,811 followers on November 2nd, up by 137,568 from 1,664,243 on October 1. Of that increase, 95,007 (or 69%) was for the @guardiantech account (which benefits from being on Twitter's suggested user list).

(NB the Telegraph seems to have deleted its badly spelled @TelegraphScienc account, so I've restated October's figures to be for 130 accounts, rather than the 131 I used to track).

The biggest mover was @MirrorFootball, up 11 places to 81st (from 455 to 809 followers), suggesting the Mirror is finally making some use of Twitter (most of its other accounts are near the bottom - and only appear to have moved up a place due to the demise of the Telegraph's Science account).

As ever, the full spreadsheet is here or you can see the iframe below.

Warning: this post is mostly wild speculation, although there is some evidence in here.

Bing has launched a Twitter search engine (there's coverage here on Search Engine Land) - it lets you search tweets. (Update: Google has too.)

What I've been wondering since last week is whether Google is already using signals from either Twitter or URL shorteners as part of its ranking decisions. You could see why it want to - seeing which pages people are retweeting and 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).

Would this explain why one of my blog posts with few tweets was ignored - but a similar, slightly later one with 00s of tweets jumped into the top 10 results?

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?

But I accidentally did something pretty close to that when the Jan Moir affair erupted last Friday.

On that Friday, I wrote two posts:

• Jan Moir: Mail readers reject her hateful bile (probably) - published at 11.23am. This was retweeted 9 times.
• Jan Moir: Twitter forces Mail to pull all adverts - published at 2.45pm. This was retweeted 345 times.

Jan Moir: hot (as a search term)

As the Jan Moir affair grew, 'Jan Moir' hit the top of the Twitter trend list, and more and more people searched, tweeted and wrote news stories and blog posts about her. At 2.45pm I noticed that searching for 'Jan Moir' triggered the hotness graph in the Google results, revealing it was the 42nd most popular search in the previous hour.

During all this, my first post was largely ignored by Google - it wasn't in the top 50 results for a search on 'Jan Moir'. I was a bit surprised by this - my blog usually does fairly well straightaway for posts obviously related to newsy keywords. (And non newsy ones - 19 minutes after publishing this post, for instance, I rank 5th for a search on 'Google signals Twitter', not that there's much competition for that search term!)

The second post, however, was retweeted straightaway many, many times. And by 4pm, just an hour later, it was the 7th result for a search on 'Jan Moir'.

Both posts were about Jan Moir. Both had 'Jan Moir' at the front of the title. Yet one was ignored by Google, and the other appeared in the top 10 results. Over the weekend, the 2nd advert-related one appeared as high as 5, and as a number of people linked to it, it settled down at position 11, which is where it is today.

So did Google decide the first post wasn't worth a high ranking amongst all the pages being written about Jan Moir - but decided the second was - well before there were any web links to it - because of the volume of tweets about it?

The caveats

There are all sorts of other reasons this might be complete and utter rubbish.

• Maybe Google was using some other data (EG Google Analytics) to decide what was relevant (but visitor numbers are a bit circular / self-fulfilling as a relevance metric - and I've not seen anyone suggest that visits to a page are an important ranking factor).
• It could just be coincidence.
• Perhaps Google only decided the search term 'Jan Moir' was 'newsy' quite late in the day, and decided to promote blog posts in the rankings only from that point. So the first post missed any QDF boost. Jan Moir tweets, according to Trendistic, really went hot at about 9-10am, peaked at noon, and only started to decline at 5pm. But who knows when search volumes picked up ...

What do you think? (If you've read this far and you're a Sphinn member, why not vote it up at Sphinn?)

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.

What's more, 151,555 of the increase (or 78% of the total) is down to just one account - that of @guardiantech (which owes its popularity to its place on the Twitter Suggested User List). Indeed, of the 131 accounts I'm tracking, 51 have fewer followers than me! You can see the full table here, or below.

National UK newspaper accounts have 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 below (or here).

I have more Twitter statistics here.

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.

Update 5 August: @Guardiantech hit a million early this morning.

With 981,359 followers, @Guardiantech is closing in on a million, as I reveal the latest figures for UK newspaper Twitter accounts. You can see the full results here, but here is a snapshot of the main findings:

• @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.
• The total number of UK national newspaper Twitter account followers has jumped from 1,075,791 to 1,258,044 in the last month, an increase of 182,253 or 17%.

Methodology

The figures use the Twitter counter API, as I explain here. I'm still looking for a way to automate this with PHP and MySQL if you can help. The API may not use the up to date figures (ie for some accounts, the figures may not be for 1 August). However, the random check I did were all pretty accurate.

And you might not think that the number of followers an account has is of any relevance to anything ...