Interesting research came from econsultancy this week regarding the most popular newspapers on Twitter. Their results were as followed based on how many times they were tweeted –
Most Popular UK Newspaper Websites on Twitter:
The Guardian ‐ 392,358 tweets per week
The Daily Telegraph ‐ 307,690 tweets per week
Daily Mail ‐ 237,381 tweets per week
Independent ‐ 214,868 tweets per week
The Mirror ‐ 113,194 tweets per week
Financial Times ‐ 61,065 tweets per week
Daily Express ‐ 24,165 tweets per week
Daily Record ‐ 11,107 tweets per week
The Times ‐ 8,772 tweets per week
Daily Star ‐ 6,556 tweets per week
The Sun ‐ 3,531 tweets per week
The Guardian comfortably won and whilst the Daily Mail has the two most tweeted stories of 2014 in the UK, The Guardian as a whole were tweeted more.
How Did The Guardian Do It?
Firstly it’s worth pointing out that whilst all these things individually matter, they all come together to fill the complete online marketing winning strategy. But here are 3 things they exceeded in the criteria for a recipe for success Twitter and the world wide web in general.
1. Right demographic for online
The Guardian’s demographic is perfectly suited to online engagement for two reasons specifically. The newspaper generally targets a large portion of people who are active online (20‐50 primarily) and they are more likely to share content than the average Sun reader let’s say, who is a builder and doesn’t spend much time on social networks. Secondly a large part of our activity on social networks relates to how we want to be perceived by others. The Guardian is generally seen as ‘intelligent’ and a liberal news source – people are happy to be seen in this light.
2. Multi twitter pages for each audience
Instead of simply having one Guardian Twitter page, they have loads of Twitter handles for each part of the website (not just for sports and technology as you’d perhaps expect, but also for Data, Society, Visuals and more). Doing this is a big factor where they beat most other national newspaper. No other newspapers goes to such an in‐depth level. What this does? Creates them as authorities in a range of fields. Let’s say you are looking for a good account for photos, you’re likely to follow the Guardian Photos page as you’ve heard of them and you’ll assume they’ll be good. You’ll follow them before you follow ‘Bob’s photos of his trips abroad’ Twitter page.
3. Quantity & relevance
You may not have heard, but content in king. The Guardian have a slight advantage in this department as they have quite a few good journalists writing content them for every day. Not only this but the content they offer is always relevant as the people who follow them want to see the latest news stories which The Guardian of course are always writing about. Relevance is always key in the digital marketing world. All of the points relate to relevance. And they all work well together – a holistic approach is always best. Should one area not be particularly working, at least other areas of your online campaign are helping grow your online presence.