National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across their 120 official Twitter accounts – with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers represented in the top ten.
The Guardian’s the clear winner, as @GuardianTech’s place on Twitter’s Suggested User List means it has 831,935 followers – 78 per cent of the total. @GuardianNews is 2nd with 25,992, @TimesFashion 3rd with 24,762 and @FinancialTimes 4th with 19,923.
Complete list of national newspaper Twitter accounts
Other findings:
- Glorified RSS Out of 121 accounts, just 19 do something other than running as a glorified RSS feed. The other 114 do no retweeting, no replying to other tweets etc. (The 19 are the ones with a blue background in their URL and a yes in the last column).
- No following. They don’t do much following. Leaving GuardianTech out of it, there are 236,963 followers of these accounts, but they follow just 59,797. Are newspapers bringing their no-linking-out approach to Twitter? Or is it just because they’re pumping RSS feeds straight to Twitter, and therefore see no reason to engage with the community?
- Rapid drop-off There are only six Twitter accounts with more than 10,000 followers. I suspect many of these accounts are invisible to most people as the newspapers aren’t engaging much – no RTing of other people’s tweets means those other people don’t have an obvious way to realise the newspaper accounts exist.
- Sun and Mirror are laggards The Sun and Mirror have a lot of work to do – they have few accounts with any followers. And they don’t promote their Twitter accounts on their sites. The Mail only seems to have one account but it is the 20th largest in terms of followers.
More on newspaper Twitter accounts:
Some papers publish lists of their Twitter accounts:
- Guardian Twitter list
- Telegraph Twitter list
- Times Twitter list
- FT Twitter list
- Independent Twitter list.
Other useful places:
- Newspaper people on Twitter from mediaUK
- Newspaper titles on Twitter (inc local) from mediaUK
- Twitian – a list of people at the Guardian who use Twitter (and their latest tweets), created by Paul Carvill.
- #followjourn – a daily recommendation service from Journalism.co.uk.
This post originally appeared on MacolmColes.co.uk.
