Top 15 British Digital Media on Facebook and Twitter — September 2015
Better Performance on Social Media than on Homepage.
BBC and The Guardian missing from top 15.
In our analysis this week, we look at the expected and real reach on social media of digital British media. We equate the total amount of unique visitors to a news website with the number of people who have a Facebook or Twitter profile in Great Britain. This information lets us extrapolate the potential of followers a publication could reach as well as evaluate their online performance.
Top Performers on Facebook
All publishers in the top five have scored above the 100% mark of expected engagement. It is noteworthy that all, except Sky News, are not ranked within the top ten of unique visitors to their websites.
The clear leader of the pack is The Economist, scoring 1546% online engagement. They are performing exceptionally well on Facebook reaching a fanbase nine times bigger than the amount of unique visitors to their website. So what’s going on there?
This could be because The Economist is a weekly newspaper so individuals who are interested in their news and want a daily update are forced to follow them online to get notifications. And because social media is rapidly becoming the main source for people to consume news, they are more likely to visit their social media pages than their website.
Looking further through the top five, we see some of the usual suspects such as Sky News, Channel 4 News and The Sun Online, with respectively 309%, 269% and 267% of expected online reach.
The top five is complemented by a regional publication, the Liverpool Echo, aimed at the greater Liverpool area, scoring 140% of expected online engagement. All of these publications are doing markedly better on social media compared to their homepages.
Publications With Highest Growth Potential on Facebook
At the bottom of the top 15, we see some publications that one might expect to be higher up on the list. Especially because three of them rank well within the top ten of unique visitors. And we would expect that they would be able to translate such unique visitor numbers into better online traction.
We see The New Statesman, at 59%, Metro at 56%, Mirror Online at 55%, the Birmingham Mail and the Telegraph Media Group both at 47% of expected online engagement. These publications are able to at least roughly double their online engagement and have ample room to improve their online engagement.
Top Performers on Twitter
Same as in the Facebook top 15, we see The Economist as undisputed number one on the Twitter top 15, scoring a staggering 5679% of expected online engagement. Again this is probably due to the fact that many people visit them on social media instead of on their website.
The top five is complemented by nearly the same publishers as before, with Channel 4 news, Sky news and the Sun Online with respectively 792%, 439% and 243% of expected online engagement. Number five on Twitter is Stv.tv, aimed at Scotland and the Scottish public, with 225% of expected engagement. Interestingly, we see engagement scores higher than 100% for the first seven publishers.
It is notable that numbers 2, 4, 5 and 7 have small amounts of unique visitors to their websites. This makes it easier to score relatively high percentages of engagement on their social media as compared to publishers scoring higher unique visitor rankings.
Publications With Highest Growth Potential on Twitter
Looking at the bottom five of the top 15, we see the Independent scoring 81% of expected engagement. The Independent is the highest ranked in unique visitor out of the entire list, usually implying they would have a stronger following online.
At the bottom four, there is somewhat of a drop in engagement to 59% for Wales Online, 55% for the Standard, 45% for the Express and the Daily Start scoring 36%. All of these publications have room to approximately double their engagement with their audience on social media.
This could be difficult for publications like Wales Online, aiming at a smaller audience compared to other publications. This could also be the case for publications that aim at a specific audiences and niche topics. For them growth could be harder.
Some Interesting Observations
We found some interesting details, ones that could influence the outcome of the top 15.
First of all, it is striking and somewhat strange to see that both the Facebook and the Twitter listings don’t contain institutions of publishing like BBC or The Guardian. Both are ranked one and two in unique visitors to their websites with respectively 96 and 121.7 million visitors per month. So why aren’t they in the top 15?
One explanation could be that these publications are so famous that their websites attract an audience on a global scale. Then there is also the language factor. English remains one of the most widespread languages in the world and therefore the barrier to read an English publication is minimized.
Both the BBC and The Guardian can attract an audience from the USA, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, among others. What’s more, in many countries where English is a second language, it’s easier for individuals from those countries to read UK publications.
Meanwhile, website visitors to BBC and The Guardian are not fully converted into social media followers. The BBC has 4.8 million Twitter followers and 23.5 million likes on Facebook. These are very large sums, but in relation to their unique website visitors this means 17% and 41% of expected engagement.
For The Guardian we see a similar dynamic, they have 4.1 million Twitter followers and 4.7 million Facebook likes, which results in 12% and 7% of expected engagement.
Other publications with a high website visitor ranking might perhaps be influenced in this way, attracting many international visitors to their website. This leads to skewed expectations concerning their online engagement.
This shows the relativity of working with percentages but it also shows what massive potential these publications have to enlarge their social media reach.
Facebook vs. Twitter
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, once again we see that Twitter is outperforming Facebook on engagement. As we have explained in earlier studies, this is not surprising because Twitter is still the number one source for consuming news on social media. But Facebook is working hard to change this and is on the rise as source for news.
A recent article by Michael Barthel and Elisa Shearer has analyzed how Americans use Twitter for sharing news [1]. For instance, 54% of their research population tweeted about news in the time period studied. Another recent study shows Twitter is the most popular social media source for breaking news finding that: “nearly 9 in 10 Twitter users in the study (86 percent) said they use Twitter for news, and the vast majority of those (74 per cent) do so daily.” [2]
Tell us what you think!
Our analysis is used internally by the company as a research mechanism to understand market behaviour and performance on social media. Now we’d like your opinion as well. Where do you prefer to read your news? Online? Or do you prefer reading your news elsewhere? Tell us!
This article is put together by Anthony Gadsdon and Smruthy Sachidanandan.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/08/19/how-do-americans-use-twitter-for-news/
