A study has found that The Independent is the most talked-about UK newspaper on social media.
Research by Brandwatch also found that newspapers generally perform better than television and radio brands on social media.
It found that across these three traditional mediums, newspapers make up 61 per cent of Twitter “buzz” – i.e. conversations of the social networking site.
Looking at 32 platforms – ten newspapers, ten radio stations and 12 TV channels – the study judged that The Independent had the best social media performance.
This was judged in terms of “mentions from Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Forums, News articles and countless other websites”. The study said: “The index assesses a brand’s total online mentions, total social mentions and the interaction between those two totals.”
Capital FM, Radio 1 and ITV were the next best performing in this index, followed by The Guardian and then the Telegraph.
The study, which was carried out between January and February this year, found that The Guardian and Independent – which have the smallest circulations of any of the newspapers looked at – were respectively the best and second best performing in terms of Twitter followers and Facebook likes.
The figures shown in the table below are old, with all newspaper accounts growing their following in the past few months. But, aside from the Telegraph overtaking the Mail to become the third largest newspaper on Twitter, the proportions have remained broadly similar. The study looked at the main Evening Standard Twitter account, which now has a following of around 33,800, rather than the news account, which has around 224,000.
The study also suggested that newspapers “do not effectively communicate” with their audience at the weekends.
The graph below compares a newspaper’s Twitter account activity with their audience’s. The audience activity is measured by looking at mentions, retweets, replies and links posted to stories.
The next graph shows that newspapers are better aligned with their readers when it comes to hours during the day.
For the study, Brandwatch looked at 1.2m UK-based mentions of the ten biggest newspapers between 1 January and 28 February 2015.
The Brandwatch report is called "Social listening in practice/ How social changed the newspaper industry".
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