Which papers tweet most efficiently?

You may be surprised to hear the Daily Mail is the most prolific UK newspaper on Twitter - or at least it is if you're after quantity, rather than quality of tweets each day. However, its tendency to simply tweet out links and headlines - predominantly in bursts of activity - is clearly doing little to attract followers in their droves to its primary Twitter account, as the following graphic of Tweets per day to followers shows [click to enlarge]: 

 
Of course there is more to the Daily Mail's inability to attract a large audience on Twitter than its approach to when it tweets and how often, such as tenure and the fact the readership it has aggressively courted in the past is unlikely to be in the vanguard of Twitter users (though let's not forget the Mail's website attracts more traffic than any rival, so this should be no forlorn hope). But it isn't alone in running to stand still. The Express and Star have also recruited relatively few followers despite fairly high levels of, albeit similarly unstrategic, Tweets. The Guardian and the FT meanwhile have engaged far more followers with a 'less is more' approach to Tweets - and that is without analysing secondary accounts such as the Guardian's hugely popular @GuardianTech account.

When it comes to efficiency there's nothing more efficient than getting somebody else to do the work for you - or in the case of Twitter get other people to retweet your efforts to an ever larger audience. So how do our national papers fare in the global retweet stakes?

The Independent - perhaps surprisingly - has a better strike rate than any of the competition in terms of getting its tweets retweeted and alongside the Guardian and the Telegraph is in the top 5,000 most commonly retweeted accounts globally according to RetweetRank.com [click to enlarge]:

 

Note: these statistics were gathered using a number of free online tools and they will date rapidly. We also also accept we've barely scratched the surface in explaining the multiple factors which could also be considerations in understanding efficiency, so consider these as being indicative of trends and perhaps not much more.

Comments

[Chris]

It's no surprise that automated feeds are a real turn off for twitter users. Journalists are encouraged by social media gurus to inject a bit of personality and banter into their tweets as they share news because, after all, twitter is supposed to be a conversation rather than a glorified RSS feed.

[CP]

Nice summary thanks. Which free tools were used to gather this data?

[Roger Myring]

There's a big difference between people Googling things and then being directed to pictures of US celebrities (often fairly obscure to British people) on the Daily Mail website, and people choosing to follow the Mail on Twitter. It would be interesting if their were stats available to show how many people visit the Mail website by directly entering its address in their browser and how many get directed to it from the Mails self-whoring of celebrity stories via Google etc.

Mailites are generally encouraged by their manual of life to be technophobes, for example their dislike of Facebook (it causes cancer, don't you know). However with Twitter the Mail see's a cheap opportunity to find stories to rehash and print. It won't therefore put doubt in their minds about it. Their readers (eg my parents) see much mention of Twitter in their beloved news source but don't really understand what it's all about (even when its explained to them all quite simply). These people want to get their news coverage spoonfed in print (as they always have) and from a trust worthy and reliable source that leaves them in a place where there's only one side of an argument and don't have to question anything.

The popularity gap of their Twitter account minus their modern-times avoiding readership and their website with massive whoring across the web is always going to be substantial even on relative terms