MarkLives published a mini-survey on the popularity of SA news services on micro-blogging service Twitter in December last year. We thought it was time for an update.
A look at subscriber numbers shows a decline across the board with the exception of the M&G Online which grew from a rather miserly 64 subscribers to 93. Grocott’s Mail seems to have thrown in the towel with no updates since Nov 11. Followers of The Times declined from 290 to 282, News24 declined from 214 to 162 and IOL fell from 417 followers to 308. Ouch.
So what went wrong? A key mistake these papers make is dumping every single story they put out onto 
Twitter. That’s a lot of content I’m not interested in. Between Dec 4 and Jan 9 News24 dumped an incredible 1935 headlines onto their poor Twitter followers. Services like CNN and Newsweek know better than to kill by volume. Instead they have a human being posting major breaking news stories only. If a local news organisation took that niche I would certainly sign up to compliment breaking global news stories with major local news items.
Secondly none of the news organisations have bothered to promote their Twitter accounts to their readers. No following their followers – the best viral for signing up subscribers. No URLs on their websites or at the end of articles. They don’t care and it shows. What a wasted opportunity.
On the upside though we welcome the Sowetan and the Daily Dispatch to our Twitter list.
Date of survey – January 8, 2009 (Ranked by popularity) [TABLE=4]
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If you find other news organisations online let me know so I can add them to the list.
Hi Marklives
Although your title uses the word “Newspapers”, in the first paragraph you use the term “News Services”. I bring this up because Muti (http://muti.co.za) is a “News Service” and it has more followers than any of those in your list with 372.
Secondly the accross the board decline in followers has really got nothing to do with the decline in popularity. I have been tracking the Muti followers and they also have dropped by around the same percentage as the others at the same time. This was dew to a huge cleanout of spam accounts that twittter started a few months ago and continues to do on a regular basis.
I take your point though about “dumping every story” into the stream, Muti is also guilty of this. There have been suggestions and it will be coming down the pipeline, to have multiple Muti twitter streams representing the popularity of posted items. The “muti5” stream for example would consist of only items which have garnered at least 5 votes. Users may then choose the level of detail they want to follow. There may be other ways of doing this as well, and any ideas you have too will be welcomed :)
Regards
Thanks for the heads up on the email account clean-up underway at Twitter. I’m sure it would have an impact, but I’m not discounting hundreds of posts leaving Twitter followers agro, and unsubscribing, and I would include myself in that number.
Re: newspapers/news services. I used the word services because although all the sites listed have a newspaper parent, some like News24 and IOL, represent numerous newspaper brands, and create their own content generation unique from their paper parents. I would suggest Muti is a news aggregator since it does not generate unique content.
Here is a pretty good site that gives the low-down on corporates in Twitter: http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/
;-)