A new study into how national newspaper websites use the social networking site Pinterest has found that The Guardian has the most followers but Mail Online has received by far the highest number of ‘pins’.
A study of 13 national daily newspapers by search and social analytics company Searchmetrics found links to web pages from Mail Online have been shared, or ‘pinned’, the most (1,963,999), followed by the Telegraph.co.uk (429,137). Guardian.co.uk was in third place with a total of 329,720 pins.
A study of the weekly data found that Mail Online also generates the most average pins per week (163,574 ), followed by Telegraph.co.uk (42,476 ) and Guardian.co.uk (32,174 ).
The most pinned page identified in the Searchmetrics study of the newspaper sites was a feature on how to make a baby’s swaddle blanket (53,638 pins) from Guardian.co.uk.
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The second most-popular pin was a Mail Online article about the Duchess of Cambridge in a teal dress gown at the London Olympic Gala concert (52,813pins), followed by another Mail feature on how to get thin thighs in 30 days (45,811pins).
Eight of the 13 national newspaper sites surveyed (see table below) were found to have at least one official Pinterest page to which they are pinning their own content (it is not necessary for a newspaper site to have a Pinterest page to enable other users to share their content on the site).
The five papers without a presence were The Sun, Daily Record, Scotsman, The Herald, and the Daily Star.
The most common subjects featured on the newspapers’ Pinterest sites were front pages, recipes and pages from style and fashion sections.
Marcus Tober, founder of Searchmetrics, said: “Pinterest has the power to put publishers’ content in front of new people and drive traffic back to their sites.
“While it’s relatively new, Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social sites – increasing its share of all visits to social sites in the UK by 1489 per cent since last year.
“The site has over 10 million registered users and in the USA high profile news sites such as the Wall Street Journal and Time are among those that are successfully using it. Our research has identified some of the early winners in the UK.”
Pinterest activity of UK national newspaper web sites (data collated week ending 12 October 2012)
|
Newspaper site |
Pinterest page |
Followers |
Total pins |
Average Pins per week |
|
1) Dailymail.co.uk |
322 |
1,963,999 |
163,574 |
|
|
2) Telegraph.co.uk |
1,502 |
429,137 |
42,476 |
|
|
3) Guardian.co.uk |
2258 |
329,720 |
32,174 |
|
|
4) TheSun.co.uk |
Not found |
n/a |
62,908 |
5,659 |
|
5) Mirror.co.uk |
114 |
28,027 |
2,198 |
|
|
6) Independent.co.uk |
829 |
16,588 |
1,668 |
|
|
7) TheTimes.co.uk |
18 |
2,204 |
286 |
|
|
8) FT.com |
309 |
1,288 |
115 |
|
|
9) DailyRecord.co.uk |
Not found |
n/a |
632 |
46 |
|
10) Scotsman.com |
Not found |
n/a |
313 |
38 |
|
11) Express.co.uk |
36 |
214 |
25 |
|
|
12) HeraldScotland.com |
Not found |
n/a |
55 |
4 |
|
13) DailyStar.co.uk |
Not found |
n/a |
4 |
1 |
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