The Biggest Twitter Publishers of January 2015

After the biggest Facebook publishers of last month, we return to Twitter to find out the biggest sites on the platform, and the stories that got people tweeting early in 2015. 
At the end of 2014, things were looking familiar: the BBC, New York Times and Mashable retained the positions that they held for much of the year, while there was steady growth in tweet numbers further down the rankings.
In January:

• The BBC broke previous records, with over 4.5 million tweets.
• All top ten sites see growth in tweets, each have over 1 million monthly tweets,
• The Guardian had 55% more tweets than in December,
• The Telegraph breaks into the top 10 for the first time, at number seven.

These were the top ten, ranked by Tweets of content published in January alone (data via Spike):

The BBC got off to an excellent start to 2015, reaching a new high of over 4.5 million. They had the second most tweeted story of the month, for a story about the reaction of the brother of the French policeman killed in terrorist attacks in Paris (51,000 tweets).
The BBC were followed once more by the New York Times and Mashable, who increased their totals from December.
In fact, it was a pretty good month for all top ten sites, with all getting well over a million tweets each. This means that some sites (such as CNN) managed to increase their overall total, despite falling in the rankings. Here’s how the top ten sites (mostly) increased their Tweet total between December and January:

Looking at the chart, the Guardian and Mashable made big gains (55% and 40%, respectively). The Guardian had four big news stories on Twitter last month, including their coverage of Boko Haram’s attacks in Nigeria, and Rupert Murdoch’s comments on the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
The most notable newcomer is the UK Telegraph, who have entered the top ten publishers for the first time. We could see this coming for a while: in December, they were in 11th place. Their live coverage of the Paris attacks was amongst the most tweeted stories of the month.
Another new name, further down the charts, is Entrepreneur, which came in in 24th place, with over 550,000 tweets. That’s despite an article count of below 1,000, which suggests that there’s a decent average engagement rate with each story.

How I Built a #Startup While #Traveling to 20 Countries https://t.co/Wq9xO70h4B #Entrepreneurship #Freedom #Wealth

— Josh Felber (@felberjosh) January 22, 2015

It’s interesting to see their dual success on LinkedIn and Twitter, On the back of January’s data, it seems clear that the site has managed to tap into a fairly solid audience through their social media channels. Interestingly, Spike’s Influencers’ feature shows that the driving force behind much of the tweeting of their stories comes from one account, that of entrepreneur Josh Felber. Targeting influencers is one way of boosting social shares.
In terms of popular content on Twitter in January, the Paris attacks were the main news event. Coverage of the attacks and their aftermath were widely tweeted from a range of publishers including the BBC, Telegraph, Russia Today, The New York Times, Independent, and may more.
Followers of these rankings will be aware of some of the extreme differences in popular content on Facebook and Twitter. The viral hits and quizzes that achieve such mind-boggling interaction rates on Facebook just don’t seem to hold the same traction on Twitter. Of course, there are a number of ready explanations as to why – different dynamics in terms of user base and format, as well as the lack (for now) of a prominent algorithm-based Twitter timeline.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s a crystal-clear split between news and entertainment on Facebook and Twitter. Many of Twitter’s most-popular stories are entertainment based. You’re just as likely to see celebrity gossip on Twitter as Facebook, but there will be less ‘evergreen’ stories that could be published at any time.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that new isn’t shared and talked about on Facebook – it is, and with impressive volume. But when it comes to the absolute measure of content popularity on both network, the differences are obvious.
Now that Twitter have launched native video (a popular move – the announcement itself was tweeted over 13,400 times in January), and are also testing curation tools for publishers, it looks as though they are ramping up their publisher offering.
The site now also has around 288 million active users, although it’s unclear if any of these include automated accounts, the type that were last year revealed to make up to 8.5% of the overall total. As the network grows, and more content is published and tweeted, it seems as though the role of Twitter as a content hub will continue to evolve in 2015.

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.
Data for the top 25 sites below. For more on our methodology, see this blog post. 

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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