Facebook and StumbleUpon push Mail and Guardian to top of social media rankings

Research by the analytics company Searchmetrics has found that StumbleUpon and Facebook appear to be the top social media tools for linking to national newspaper websites.

The research looked at how often content from 12 national newspaper sites was shared on six social networking and bookmarking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Google) in the ten weeks up to 24 October.

Unsurprisingly, Mail Online topped the table with an average 2,908,779 links a week followed by The Guardian with 2,587,258, while The Times website, which is behind a paywall, came last with just 256 links.

The latest ABC figures show the Mail remains the most popular national newspaper website with average monthly global browsers of 67,606,156, followed by the Guardian (52,086,069) and The Telegraph (37,977,383).

Here’s the full table from Searchmetrics:

www.dailymail.co.uk (2,908,779 links/week)
www.guardian.co.uk (2,587,258 links/week)
www.telegraph.co.uk (879,783 links/week)
www.independent.co.uk (617,148 links/week)
www.thesun.co.uk (195,311 links/week)
www.ft.com (83,382 links/week)
www.dailyrecord.co.uk (82,151 links/week)
www.mirror.co.uk (54,881 links/week)
www.heraldscotland.com (13,063 links/week)
www.express.co.uk (9,600 links/week)
www.dailystar.co.uk (702 links/week)
www.thetimes.co.uk (256 links/week)

Searchmetrics also said it analysed the spread of social networks on which the Mail Online and Guardian’s pages were shared.

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Just over half of its links (50.9 per cent) came from StumbleUpon, followed by Facebook activity (likes, shares and comments) accounting for 45.9 per cent and links on Twitter 3.2 per cent.

More than half (56.8 per cent) of the Guardian’s links came from Facebook with StumbleUpon accounting for 31.4 per cent and Twitter 11 per cent according to the study.

Searchmetrics CEO Dr Horst Joepen said:

Some people we have shown this data to have been surprised at the volume of links generated for UK newspapers on the StumbleUpon social bookmarking site.

This is a very popular site globally and the links could have been generated throughout the world from English speakers who use StumbleUpon.”

Here are the top three most linked stories for Mail Online:

And here’s the Guardian’s top three