Journalism.org recently published a report on how mainstream media outlets use Twitter
Among the findings
of this new study:
·
The news outlets studied varied
widely in the number of Twitter feeds or channels offered and in how
frequently they posted. On average, the news organizations offered 41 different
feeds. The Washington Post,
at the top of the list, offered 98, more than twice the average. The Daily Caller, on the
other hand, offered a single Twitter feed. The level of activity also ranged
widely. While as a group the outlets in the sample averaged 33 tweets a day
on their main organizational Twitter feed, that number ranged from close to
100 a day to fewer than 10.
·
These news organizations were much
more similar in the focus of their Twitter activity. The vast majority of the
postings promoted the organizations’ own work and sent users back to their
websites. On the main news feeds, fully 93 percent of the postings over the
course of the week offered a link to a news story on the organization’s own
website.
·
News organizations rarely used
Twitter as a reporting tool or to curate or recommend information that
originated elsewhere. Just 2 percent of the tweets from the main news feed
analyzed were information-gathering in nature—seeking views or first-hand
accounts from readers. And only 1 percent of tweets studied were “retweets”
that were reposted from a Twitter feed outside of the organization.
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