A big month on Facebook doesn’t always translate to more sharing activity on Twitter, as our latest Twitter rankings show.Â
In July, we saw huge excitement on Twitter over the World Cup, and a new record for most tweets of an individual story, on a piece about a teenage musician. In August, things were a little quieter at the top of the chart, giving sites further down the rankings a chance to catch up with the leaders. Here’s the top ten for last month, ranked by tweets (data via Spike):
Remarkably, the BBC have been on the top ever since we started publishing this data 12 months ago. It’s been a good year for their social team, and while closest rivals the New York Times have also made great strides in recent months, their 1 million tweet gap looks likely to maintain the status quo for the near future.
Despite the major global events which contributed to many sites having a bumper month on Facebook, the same pattern was not to be seen on Twitter. As we noted last month, there is far more stability in the Twitter rankings, a case that seems to even hold true in bad months. Many of the bigger sites, including leaders the BBC and the New York Times, saw a slight decline on their July figures.
There’s no obvious explanation for this decline. It’s possible that the World Cup, which was a huge event on Twitter, unevenly upped July’s totals.
Despite this, there was plenty of growth further down the ranks. ABC News overtook Mashable to take third spot in the rankings for the first time. CNN bucked the trend by bringing their monthly total up by around 200,000 tweets, overtaking the Guardian to take fifth place.
BuzzFeed fell out of the top ten, while Yahoo took their place, becoming one of only a few major sites that increased their monthly tweets, reaching over 1m for the first time. NBC News also increased their share of tweets marginally, while The India Times entered at number 25 for the first time.
The most-tweeted news story of the month was a piece from the New York Times titled ‘Autopsy Shows Michael Brown Was Struck At Least Six Times‘, which was tweeted almost 50,000 times in August. The Ferguson story dominated the news agenda on Twitter in August, with numerous stories relating to the Missouri protests making it into the most tweeted charts for the month.
Here are some of the Ferguson-related stories that made our most-tweeted list for August:
Last week saw senior Twitter figures drop heavy hints that an algorithm-driven content feed could be on the cards for Twitter in the near future.
Any algorithm influence that’s put front and centre of people’s user experience is likely to bring disruption to these monthly rankings. While sites with large Twitter followers (like the BBC) have an immediate advantage in the current set-up, a feed that bubbles up trending tweets from across the network is likely to have a major impact on what users retweet and click.
You can check out the top 25 sites below. For more details on specific sites’ performance, feel free to drop us an email.
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. To learn more about the methodology behind these rankings, check out this post.Â
