We break down the biggest sites on Twitter during February, and find out what effect #TheDress had on engagement figures on the network.
The faster Twitter moves, the more our monthly publisher rankings teach us about social distribution.
Here’s what happened in February:
- The BBC became the first publisher to break the 5 million monthly tweets mark,
- Mashable grew their tweet count by over 400,000, to close in on second place,
- The success of BuzzFeed’s Dress posts saw them join the top ten.
These were the biggest sites on Twitter last month, according to data from Spike:
The BBC managed to break the 5 million tweet mark for the first time. They’re still miles ahead of their nearest rivals, and had several big stories in February. Interestingly, they included three big sports stories, on the England football team, boxing, and an interactive feature that allows readers find out how long (in minutes) it would take their favourite football stars to earn their salary.
The BBC use Twitter as a way of staying as informed as possible in real time, and sometimes manage to spot breaking stories long before the competition, thanks to careful monitoring of Twitter.
It was an excellent month for Mashable, who managed to close the gap significantly on the New York Times. They finished just a few thousand tweets off second spot. Mashable also scored the second biggest story of the month on Twitter, titled ‘How Just Bieber and Floyd Mayweather Bonded Over An App’ (72,000 tweets).
Despite this, the NYT will be happy with their month. They had a record number of stories in the most tweeted list last month (see below). For more on how the New York Times approaches its social strategy, check out this recent interview with senior staff editor Michael Roston.
Other sites that did well in February include USA Today, who climb to 18th overall, and NPR, who break the 500,000 tweet mark to enter the rankings at number 25 (see below for full rankings).
In yesterday’s post, we looked at how different headlines are more likely to provoke different engagements on Facebook. It looks as though a similar effect exists on Twitter.
Some of the most-tweeted stories of the month were about the passing of well-known figures, and breaking news events.
The New York Times’ report on the death of Leonard Nimroy, who played Spock in Star Trek, was the most tweeted piece of the month, with over 73,200 tweets and re-tweets. A report on the sudden death of the paper’s media reporter, David Carr, was also tweeted heavily.
Many of us now get our breaking news updates through our Twitter timeline. Occasionally (but with increasing frequency), the newsflashes that we see on Twitter are so unexpected and immediate that there’s almost an instinctive urge to acknowledge them in some way – often by retweeting. That was evidenced in February’s data, with surprise stories such as the announcement of a second Harper Lee novel and Jon Stewart’s retirement all getting huge shares.
Of course, it’s not all hard news. February spawned one of the biggest viral hits of recent times (The Dress), initiated by a post on that BuzzFeed that has since attracted close to 40 million views.
We also remember February for the llama incident, which saw online media melt into a flurry of drama over two Arizona llamas whose bid for freedom was live-streamed around the world.
But internet fame is a fleeting thing. Despite seeming to melt Twitter for a brief few hours on February 27th, the llamas didn’t make any of the top tweeted stories for the month, being forced aside by the controversial colour of a dress that no one could agree on.
That original BuzzFeed Dress post earned them over 70,000 tweets. Interestingly, that was far higher than the Facebook engagement rate for the post. The post was initially helped along its way to virality by a tweet from the Ellen Degeneres Show account (which we found using the Influencers feature in Spike). The extra bump in dress related tweets helped BuzzFeed break the 1 million tweet mark in February, and to take eight place overall.
From this day on, the world will be divided into two people. Blue & black, or white & gold. https://t.co/xJeR7GldwP pic.twitter.com/i6BwVzPzSZ
— Ellen DeGeneres (@EllenDeGeneres) February 27, 2015
The rest of the most tweeted stories of the month were an unusual bunch.
Where the Data Comes From
All the data comes from Spike, our content discovery platform. As well as Facebook Posts, Spike now features Influencers and Creators – new features that show important Twitter users driving the conversation in different niches, and the writers making the most-tweeted stories. Sign up for a free trial today.
Data for the top 25 sites below. For more on our methodology, see this blog post.Â
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.Â
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