malcolm coles

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 ...

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