The Biggest Twitter Publishers of July 2014

August 12, 2014

Written by NewsWhip

We rank the most-tweeted sites of July 2014, and look at the stories that picked up the most Twitter traction. 

Following on from last week’s look at the biggest Facebook publishers of July 2014, here are the top ten Twitter publishers of the month, in order of tweets. (Via Spike).

top 10 twitter july

At the top, the BBC continue their lead and gradual growth. Their most-tweeted story of the month was their live coverage of the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine.
Following the BBC were the usual contenders – The New York Times, Mashable, ABC News, The Guardian and CNN all held firmly on to their June positions, with decent gains all of a hundred thousand tweets or more all round.
We’ve seen that there’s much more stability in the Twitter rankings than on Facebook, where sites can gain a lot of traction in a very short space of time. Different forms of content go viral on Twitter, possibly due to the lack of algorithm influence (for now).
For the past few months, we’ve seen more or less the same sites put in strong performances in the top 25. There’s no doubt that there is good growth in sharing activity on the network, but there is less likelihood that the hierarchy sees major disruption from month to month.
The Huffington Post finally crossed the 1 million tweet mark in July,
It was also a good month for the Independent, who rose from number 22 to 17 from June. They also landed a good number of stories in the top 100 for July, indicating that their social media strategies are paying off.
The most-tweeted story of the month was a BuzzFeed song premiere from a popular teenage singer called Shawn Mendes.

The post had over 150,000 tweets, approximately twice the number achieved by June’s biggest story. Meanwhile, it got hardly any traction on Facebook. The story didn’t seem to have been posted on the BuzzFeed Music page, their main page, or on Mendes’ official Facebook page. Mendes did retweet it to his 1.6 million devoted followers on Twitter though, indicating that a big name can hold more influence than any media brand. It helped BuzzFeed return to the top ten, and bumped their monthly total up to almost 950,000.
Another huge Twitter story was FIFA’s official liveblog of the World Cup final on July 13. It got over 94,000 tweets, ending out a very successful World Cup campaign for FIFA’s social media team.
Like Facebook, the Israel – Gaza conflict dominated the news stories shared on Twitter throughout July. News stories from The New York Times, the Guardian, The Huffington Post and Al Jazeera filled the list of the most-tweeted URLs, reinforcing the idea that Twitter has a deep interest in current news events.
Find the top 25 publishers from last month below. Figures are for English language publishers only, and relate to content published in July alone.
You can read about our methodology in this blogpost. As usual, we’d love to hear any of your questions, comments or requests. Get in touch by email, or on Twitter @NewsWhip.

How do we know how sites are doing on Twitter?

We compiled our data using Spike, which tracks the content that people are sharing and engaging with on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest, in real time. It’s used by some of the world’s leading digital newsrooms – there’s a free trial for new users.
While we strive for complete coverage, sometimes we will miss some content for some publishers. If it looks to you like we’re missing something or have our numbers wrong, feel free to drop us a line.
 

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