In the final Twitter rankings of 2014, we see the advantage of getting retweeted by social influencers in increasing reach and reaching new readers.Â
After posting the biggest Facebook publishers of December yesterday, we pulled exclusive data from Spike’s database to find the biggest sites on Twitter at the end of 2014.
This month:
- Almost all publishers see a dip in total tweets, likely due to holiday season,
- Order of top ten remains virtually unchanged since November,
- The most-tweeted stories of the month were linked by Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift, demonstrating their influence on Twitter.
Here were the top ten sites, ranked by total tweets for stories published during December:
The top ten remains virtually unchanged in order, with the only change from November being CNN and Bleacher Report’s flipping of positions in sixth and seventh.
In the last month of 2014, the most-tweeted sites remained the BBC, followed by the New York Times and Mashable, all of whom were awarded as Best on Twitter in 2014 in our inaugural blog awards last month.
In the Facebook rankings, we saw a slight fall-off in overall engagements during the month. The same happened on Twitter, with the BBC falling back from reaching the four million tweet mark. We’re putting that down to the festive season, given that most of the top sites published less, too.
Bleacher Report continued their strong run of form, coming in at sixth overall, despite a drop in tweets.
Outside the top 10, the Mail Online dropped some places, to 18th. The most-tweeted story of the month came from Business Insider, and was titled ‘The 7 Biggest Comeback Brands of 2015‘, with 84,600 tweets. That was almost entirely down to it being tweeted by Justin Bieber to his 59 million plus followers – an achievement that the BI social media team must surely be pleased with. That helped them jump from 21st to 17th overall, and illustrates the advantages of targeting and being linked by social influencers.
2015 ready https://t.co/rPYvU1tt5J
— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) December 28, 2014
Meanwhile, Billboard jumped back into the rankings. They had one of the most-tweeted stories of the month, with a piece titled ‘The Year In Pop 2014‘, which was tweeted almost 67,ooo times. Naming One Direction ‘Top Artists’ of the year may have had something to do with the energetic manner in which the story was tweeted and retweeted.
It seemed to be a particularly big month for pop culture on Twitter, with even the New York Times’ most-tweeted story titled ‘The Year Of Taylor Swift‘, which was tweeted 16,800 times, almost 4,000 times more than their report on the thawing of political relations between Cuba and the US. In this case, it was the NYT’s main Twitter account that set off the barrage of retweeting – helped along the way by a retweet from Swift’s own account.
1989 was the year Taylor Swift was born. 2014 was The Year of Taylor Swift https://t.co/p8locf2Q9a pic.twitter.com/j9MwbiCngc
— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 19, 2014
Indian site NDTV returned to the top 25, rejoining the India Times as the second Indian site in the Twitter charts. Just outside the range of the top 25, well-known names including USA Today, TIME, NPR and Vice all vie for position.
One new feature that publishers will be lining up to try out on Twitter in the near future is native video. The effect that this feature has had, and may continue to have, for publishers on Facebook has been well-documented. Twitter says that they’ll be rolling out native video in the first half of 2015, and it remains to be seen how publishers on Twitter will best be able to use it to influence their overall reach on the network.
Where The Data Comes From
All the data comes from Spike, our content discovery platform. We recently added 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.
Feel free to share with whoever you think might find this data interesting, and be sure to subscribe to the blog for future updates.
Data for the top 25 sites below. For more on our methodology, see this blog post. Note: A full month’s worth of data for the Wall Street Journal was unavailable, so they have been excluded from the December rankings.Â
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